Washington DC VMUG Presentation on Aug 20 2020 - TinkerTry home lab’s VMware vSphere 7.0 upgrade challenges, successes, and lessons learned.

Posted by Paul Braren on Aug 19 2020 (updated on Aug 26 2020) in

I wanted to let folks know that I'll be presenting tomorrow, and I'm hoping folks can join us from all across the world to not just hear my experiences, but to share yours as well. In case you didn't know, Al Rasheed is a co-leader for this VMUG, and it's my very first time presenting to this particular VMUG. I sure am looking forward to it!

Aug 20 5pm update - Now that the presentation is done, I've published the slide deck here. DC VMUG Co-leader Al Rasheed mentioned that at one point we had over 100 folks in attendance on the Zoom, that's awesome! This was the biggest VMUG audience I've ever had actually.

Doing a virtual conference, of course it's not nearly as easy to know if the audience was enjoying their time, given I had to keep them on "Mute All" most of the call, but it seemed to go well enough overall. Maybe someday I get to meet some of these new-to-me names in person...

Video

TinkerTry - DC VMUG Aug 2020 - TinkerTry home lab’s VMware vSphere 7.0 upgrade challenges, successes, & lessons

Here's a copy of the original announcement, from my Public Speaking page, as it originally appeared:

Aug 20 2020

Main Presenter.

Washington D.C. VMUG

Wed Aug 20 2pm - 4pm Eastern
TinkerTry home lab’s VMware vSphere 7.0 upgrade challenges, successes, and lessons learned.
by Paul Braren, Founder of TinkerTry.com, LLC

Come see Paul Braren’s latest adventures in workbench testing of “TinkerTry’d” home lab Xeon D servers. His close look at the vSphere 7.0 upgrade process has produced numerous revelations about VMware licensing (vExpert/VMUGAdvantage/Essentials) and support, and about various upgrade techniques. Many of his challenges were of the self-induced variety, others were related to unusual use-cases. Once the rough edges were resolved, he used the lessons-learned to finalize his configuration on his 4th node, the 12 core production server. This crucial always-on system is where his VCSA 7.0b, automated backups, and Windows 10 workstation VM all reside, used heavily for all content creation at TinkerTry including vSphere 7 articles and videos, even 4K video editing on triple monitors! He’ll cover automated graceful ESXi shutdowns, UPS battery failures, brutal Folding at home workloads, router and network issues, and long shipping delays that all conspired to slow progress. Come along for this deeper dive into exactly what went down during Paul’s relentless evening and weekend tinkering, and also learn exactly how he ultimately prevailed over some small and not-so-small issues with audio support and GPU passthrough quirks. Along the way, you’ll see the variety of simple tools he’s come to rely upon in the 15 years since his first VCP, part of his planned live demo of his compact and efficient home datacenter, now running the latest VMware ESXi 7.0b hypervisor on all 4 nodes!