Since the Mac Pros in my current production environment need to last until the end of the year, I need to get them up to speed before I fall off Apple’s support train. I skipped Yosemite in production because of stories of worse stability and performance than Mavericks. Justified or not, that’s where they’ve stayed since and without issue thus far. However, since a new MacOS is going to be announced shortly, Mavericks is probably getting close to end of life. With El Capitan, Apple seems to have sorted out most of it’s issues so it’s time to get my production environment up to speed.
I have a test server at home with the same setup as production. As always, it’s prudent to test the upgrade paths for both the OS and VMware just so no nasty surprises crop up during the real thing.
The first thing to do is to get VMware Fusion up to version 8. Fusion 8 has support for El Capitan as a host as well as a guest. It’s best to get Fusion updated first as version 8 runs on older operating systems whereas older versions of Fusion have known issues on the newer OSes.
As it turns out, while I had licenses for the 8 Pro for my production boxes, I needed to get a new license for the test host. This was arguably the most difficult step as anyone who has dealt with VMware’s website would know. That said, it was relatively painless except for the hit to the pocket.
With the license paid for, installation was a breeze, after all it is a Mac. And behold, VMware Fusion Professional Version 8.1.1 ready to go.
A quick check of my existing VMs showed no problems and I was now ready to bit the big one and upgrade to El Capitan.
Before I hit the upgrade button, I decided I should take the opportunity to more thoroughly test Fusion by performing a test upgrade of my Code42 backup environment. Since I needed to upgrade that in production as well. I’ll cover how that went in another post.
Satisfied that all was working well from a VM host perspective, it was time to hit the free upgrade button. But then I thought, I should really take a backup of the VMs in case anything goes wrong. No sense in assuming the upgrade will go smoothly. Which meant I had to fix Crashplan on my Synology but that is a story for another time.
With backups done, time to hit the big button.
Actually the upgrade process went so smoothly, it was rather anti-climatic. This is actually good and bodes well for the production systems. I have to commend Apple for making a relatively painless upgrade process. So far everything works and only a couple more tests before I can pack it away again and get on with the real builds.
The Infosec Noob 
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