What’s in docs.hollebollevsan.nl, and what’s next
The conversations I keep having with customers about a VMware upgrade aren’t about whether to do it — they’re about the specifics: which phase comes before which, what breaks if you skip a step, what to do about the parts that don’t fit the standard sequence. That’s planning work, and it’s different every time depending on what’s actually driving the fleet. I got tired of re-deriving it from scratch per engagement, so I started writing it down properly — and I’ve now made that guide, docs.hollebollevsan.nl, public.
Two tracks, because “upgrade VMware” isn’t one procedure
The guide splits by what’s actually driving the fleet, because the honest answer to “how do I upgrade” depends entirely on that:
- Full VCF — SDDC Manager / VCF Management Services runs the upgrade end to end, phase by phase.
- Standalone VVF (VMware vSphere Foundation, no VCF Management Services) — vCenter and ESXi are patched through the standard vSphere lifecycle mechanisms instead, by hand.
Each track gets its own landing page — /vcf/, /vvf/ — showing only the docs that apply to it. Pick a track once, and everything you read after that is actually for you — not a generic procedure with footnotes for what doesn’t apply.
The part I actually care about: the manual steps
Full VCF has SDDC Manager to drive most of the upgrade for you. Standalone VVF doesn’t — and even on a full-VCF fleet, a handful of steps still fall outside what Fleet Management touches. Those are the steps that go wrong in practice: not because they’re hard, but because “upgrade vCenter manually” isn’t an instruction, it’s a category. So wherever a step is manual, the guide tries to walk through the actual clicks rather than naming the task and leaving the rest as an exercise. The manual GUI vCenter upgrade doc is the clearest example — the Phase 6 alternate path for anyone without Fleet Management, spelled out step by step instead of assumed.
Around that core sequence, the guide also covers the workstreams that tend to get bolted on or forgotten at the edges of an upgrade: migrating SRM/vSphere Replication to VCF’s Protection and Recovery, moving IWA to AD-over-LDAPS before the phase that needs it, taking Aria Operations to VCF Operations, finalizing NSX and its Edge cluster, bringing Log Insight forward to Log Management 9.1, and moving VIDM/Workspace ONE Access to the VCF Identity Broker once Fleet Management exists to receive it. There’s a running field notes page for the gotchas that only show up on a real upgrade, and a Dell VxRail addendum layered on top for that hardware specifically — kept separate from the general flow on purpose, since that split needs to stay real for whichever hardware platform shows up next.
Every doc page also has a Print / Save as PDF button for a properly paginated copy of just that page, and a combined build for the whole guide when someone wants to email it instead of sending a link.
Where it’s going
The upgrade guide isn’t the ceiling of the site. It shares its conventions with vcf-planning.hollebollevsan.nl, which covers from-scratch deployment planning (fleet shutdown/startup ordering, firewall flows, SSO configuration, certificate authority setup) — docs.hollebollevsan.nl links out to that rather than duplicating it. The plan is for docs.hollebollevsan.nl to outgrow upgrade-specific, and eventually VCF-specific, content — more VMware topics over time, on the same site, with the same rule of linking out instead of copying content in. New sections land when they’re genuinely ready, not on a fixed schedule.
This isn’t a one-time write-up either. It grows out of ongoing engagements — every upgrade turns up its own real-life situations and real-life issues, and the field notes page and the guide itself are where the generalized lessons actually land. What’s live today reflects what I’ve run into so far; what’s live next reflects whatever the next engagement runs into.
If you’re planning a VCF or VVF upgrade and something’s missing, wrong, or could be clearer — tell me.
