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.

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VMware Virtual Machine Hardware features

This post is mostly for my own information, but could be useful to other people while searching for the Virtual Machine Hardware features available within each release, starting with version 4 (ESX/ESXi 3.5) and ending with version 9 (ESXi 5.1).

I got this information off the VMware website (vSphere 5.1 documentation) and in my opinion the following features are the most important ones:

Version 4 (ESX/ESXi 3.5 and later)
64 GB RAM limit
4 Logical processors
4 Virtual NICs
128MB video memory

Version 7 (ESX/ESXi 4.x and later)
255 GB RAM limit
8 Logical processors
LSI Logic SAS and Paravirtual adapters
Virtual IDE disks
10 Virtual NICs
VMXNET3 NICs
128MB video memory
More guest operating systems supported

Version 8 (ESXi 5.0 and later)
1 TB RAM limit
32 Logical processors
LSI Logic SAS and Paravirtual adapters
Virtual IDE disks
10 Virtual NICs
VMXNET3 NICs
128MB video memory
SVGA 3D hardware acceleration
More guest operating systems supported

Version 9 (ESXi 5.1 and later)
1 TB RAM limit
64 Logical processors
LSI Logic SAS and Paravirtual adapters
Virtual IDE disks
10 Virtual NICs
VMXNET3 NICs
Nested hypervisor support
512MB video memory
SVGA 3D hardware acceleration
More guest operating systems supported