Upgrading HPE SimpliVity using the CLI when Upgrade Manager is giving you headaches

So, you’re ready to upgrade your environment to a higher SimpliVity version right? Good stuff! It’s great to keep your environment up-to-date to receive new features and security updates.

For SimpliVity, you would typically use HPE SimpliVity Upgrade Manager. However, this software sometimes seems to have a mind of its own and will not launch, or actually fire off your upgrade.

This post is dedicated to using the CLI as a way to upgrade your environment, and is from this day on also my personal preferred method.

How to Upgrade Your Entire HPE SimpliVity Environment including VMware vSphere, Firmware and Third-Party Software

This article is about upgrading your HPE SimpliVity environment, including all of the components that come with this upgrade: VMware vSphere, firmware and your third-party software.

I will describe the global steps, time estimation, do’s and don’ts and tips from my side as I have a lot of experience performing these kind of upgrades.

The information in this article is based on HPE SimpliVity 4.0.0.

Unable to deploy HPE SimpliVity 3.7.4 and higher on Cisco UCS, Dell and Lenovo

While deploying a fresh image of HPE SimpliVity on a Cisco UCS machine, I came across a problem where the HPE SimpliVity Deployment Manager was not able to recognize the IP address of the machine as OmniStack host.

This article explains the cause and how to fix it.

Update: This article is valid for Lenovo SystemX, Cisco UCS and Dell OmniCube. All non-HPE hardware is requiring an alternate approach to deployment after factory reset.

Deploying Citrix XenDesktop on a Multi-Node HPE SimpliVity Cluster

We’ve all seen the “SimpliVity VM Data Access Not Optimized” warning on our VMs when the running instance is not aligned with a local storage copy. This articles provides information on how this alignment is done and which SimpliVity tweaks are required to work with Citrix XenDesktop.

SimpliVity Degraded Performance On HPE Gen9

During a project at one of our customers, we were facing very strange performance issues on migrated VMs that were running on legacy hardware before (vSphere-based), but were performing worse on newer hardware. This article is a must read for SimpliVity customers running on HPE Gen9 hardware as you could be impacted as well!

Free VMware vSphere Backup Solutions

This article focuses on some free backup solutions for VMware vSphere as VMware’s home-brewed vSphere Data Protection is End-of-Life and will not support any releases after vSphere 6.5.