The pre-migration step includes a plan of the tasks that should be done before starting the actual migration. An analysis of the expected benefits of the new features should be done to determine the added value to your business and justify the investment to the management. Try to obtain as much documentation as you can, such as guides, release notes, tips of the new release, to limit possible problems. How the new release and the new features should be implemented and configured is also an essential key point for a successful migration.

Make sure that running programs in the current vSphere environment are also supported in the release you are going to install. If other VMware products are used in your network, validate the compatibility of each product by using the VMware Product Interoperability Matrices available on the VMware website at the URL https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php:

Before migrating, it's also useful to determine obsolete VM and services no longer required that don't need to be migrated. Performing a health assessment of your current vSphere environment is useful to detect objects that are no longer needed but are still consuming resources, and to fix misconfigurations to avoid issues during the migration cleaning up the network.

There are several tools available on the market that allow you to perform a health check of the vSphere environment. In addition to solutions that require a license, some free tools can also be used to health check your virtual platform.

Here, some examples of commercial and free products you can use for the health check of your environment:

• Licensed: VMware vRealize Operations Manager, vSphere Optimization Assessment, Runecast Analyzer, Opvizor Health Analyzer
• Free: Turbonomic Virtual Health Monitor, HPE Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV), Veeam One Free Edition, RVTools