I was digging around this week while planning some VCF lab upgrades and came across VMware’s new VCF Upgrade Planner tool.
Honestly… this is something VMware probably needed a long time ago.
Anyone working with VCF already knows upgrades are no longer just:
- upgrade vCenter
- upgrade ESXi
- call it a day
Now you have to think about:
- NSX alignment
- BOM compatibility
- workload domains
- imported clusters
- VCF Operations / Automation versions
- Supervisor dependencies
- conversion paths
- and what versions are actually supported together
Most of the time you end up bouncing between release notes, KBs, and interoperability matrices trying to piece everything together.
The planner looks like it helps simplify some of that.
What I like is that it seems built around how environments actually look in the real world — not just perfectly clean greenfield VCF deployments.
A lot of customers are somewhere in-between:
- traditional vSphere
- partial VCF adoption
- imported environments
- NSX added later
- older operational tooling
- mixed deployment models
From what I’ve seen so far, the tool does a pretty decent job helping visualize supported upgrade and conversion paths without having to manually trace everything yourself.
Obviously still validate everything against official release notes and compatibility docs before touching production… but this looks like it could be pretty useful for planning and understanding upgrade flow.
Looking forward to spending more time with it as I start planning upgrades in my own VCF lab.