vSphere 6 has been out for a while and it ships with some cool new features that provide some handy benefits for many users of the platform. However not many people have rushed to upgrade from 5.5 to 6 (unless you are a greenfield deployment) including many of my customers who’ve held back till the new version settles down and let others be the guinea pigs and catch all the bugs….etc. However, now that update 1 is released (along with VSAN stretch cluster support), I think its reasonably mature enough for me to somewhat comfortably recommend the deployment of vSphere 6.x for production use (FYI – Please note that this is something personal and is not a reflection on every VMware product upgrade. I used to jump on to every major vSphere platform version upgrades as soon as they were generally available in the past, but then burned my hands pretty badly due to the update time bug that was released with one of those vSphere upgrades in 2008. Since then I’ve personally been somewhat reluctant to embrace every major vSphere platform version upgrade immediately as soon as it becomes available. So I usually let everyone else test it out first and wait till a minor update version, such as update 1 version comes out before I start deploying it for production use / advising my customers to deploy it)
Anyhow, now that we are good to go from my perspective, I will try and publish a number of separate articles for each major step involved in a typical deployment of vSphere 6.x as per below (I’m using 6.0 U1 here but should generally be the same for all 6.0 versions and its sub variants).