An Opportunity to Modernise your Data Centre
VMware announced that vSphere v6.0 is going End of General Support (EOGS) on 12th March 2020. To read a quick introduction to this, you can read part 1 of this blog series here.
VMware recommend upgrading to vSphere v6.7 to remain in support. Whilst this may be an easy transition for some businesses, others will be faced with a complex upgrade project and one barrier to this could be hardware compatibility.
Incompatible Hardware
VMware regularly maintains a hardware compatibility matrix for each version. Whilst they try to retain backwards compatibility, if the hardware being used is old then upgrading to vSphere v6.7 may not work or perform as well. We see hardware at five years or older where issues can occur and can complicate a software upgrade project as now you have to also upgrade the hardware.
A great time to carry out a software upgrade like this is in fact when you also have an upcoming hardware refresh. This provides an opportunity to evaluate newer technologies to best utilise the new software. It can also help to de-risk an upgrade as you can have the new environment sat side-by-side to the older one whilst you carry out testing and then the migration.
An Opportunity for Modern VMware Technologies
Software defined data centres are becoming ever more popular and VMware is the leader in this space. When combining the move to vSphere 6.7 and a hardware refresh, you could start to look at vSAN for a core hyper-converged platform and NSX for software-defined networking or go VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) to implement a hybrid cloud strategy. By moving to modern technology solutions like VCF, you will gain a number of benefits including:
- Lifecycle management of software and hardware to simplify and reduce maintenance windows, leading to less downtime of critical services
- Consolidation of hardware to be more cost efficient with a platform lowering TCO by up to 30-40%
- VCF is a fully integrated hybrid cloud providing a single platform of compute, storage, network, security and public cloud – all managed by a single software and management stack
If your business has a long-term cloud strategy and you have to refresh your current hardware platform then transforming to a software-defined platform will help make the transition simpler whilst providing greater business value.
How can CDW help?
At CDW, we have a wealth of knowledge and experience to help de-risk large projects such as this. Our solution architects and technical experts can offer the support you need to correctly assess your current environment, plan for a successful upgrade and remove complexity. Our processes streamlined over many years has allowed us to develop methodologies which reduce the time and cost for our customers. CDW has professional services to help carry out the work on your behalf, augmenting or freeing up your own resources.
We are also experience in helping our customers move from legacy data centre architectures to modern cloud enabled solutions such as vSAN, VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cloud on AWS. Our experts can help you to evaluate alternative solutions which drive greater business benefit and cost optimisations.
To book some time with one of our VMware experts and learn more, please email us or contact your CDW Account Manager.
