** This article is a preview for the vSphere Assessment Tool soon to be launched **

In this quick walkthrough we're going to show you an overview of the vSphere Assessment Tool.

Take advantage of the enhanced security and operational efficiencies available in the latest vSphere release by leveraging the vSphere Assessment Tool, a simple, online and offline tool to help jump-start your vSphere upgrade.

Before you begin this walkthrough ensure you have the following:

The vSphere Assessment Tool identifies older unsupported vSphere versions, and accelerates your upgrade by providing best practices tips and upgrade documentation to help ensure a successful upgrade. This tool will help give you visibility into your storage and server infrastructure and can provide details on vSphere versions and hardware compatibility to ensure you have all the information you need on your environments.

Open your favorite browser and navigate to
​https://pathfinder.vmware.com/vsphereassessmenttool/ and click Login.

Enter the email associated with your VMware ID account, followed by your password

After logging in you will be brought to the VAT dashboard. Click Download to save the assessment tool to your computer. Here we will save the Windows 64-bit version.

Open the folder containing the downloaded file, and then unzip the file.

Double click to open the setup file. Then go ahead and click Start on the VAT to begin.

Now let's connect our vCenter account to the assessment tool. Click the Add vCenter Account button to input your credentials and server URL for your vCenter Server Account.

When finished click Add.

The VAT will display a message letting you know the vCenter account has been added successfully. Let's click Add vCenter Server Account to add a second account that will also be checked for compatibility.

With the second server and vCenter account information entered, click Add.

Once the second vCenter account has been added successfully, click Run Data Collection.

Once the data collection has finished, click Proceed.

To consult the information that was collected during the assessment, you can save or send the collected data from the selected vCenter Server accounts. To save a local copy as a .json file, click Save Data File.

Now let's connect our VAT account to send the collected data to compatibility check. First, return to the browser window that has the VAT dashboard open.

Click the second button for VAT Passcode, to be shown your unique passcode. Click the Copy button to store the Passcode on your clipboard.

Switch back to the vSphere Assessment Tool window. Enter your VAT passcode and click Send Collected Data.

Click Close once the data has been sent successfully.

Switch over once again to the VAT My Dashboard window, and click the reload button on the browser. Since your collected data was linked to your VAT account, reloading the page will now display this information, summarized in your dashboard.

From the dashboard, you can switch between the summary and detailed views of each server. You can drill down into each from the sidebar on the left. In the Dallas data center for example, you can see that most of the infrastructure is on vSphere 6.5. There is a host at 5.5, and you can see that that host in particular cannot be upgraded, based on some hardware incompatibility. You can also see that from some of our other hosts on 6.5, one can actually go to 6.7, and the rest of them can’t.

Also, if you click on a particular host, you can see all the different pieces of hardware, as well as which pieces may or may not have issues with the upgrade compatibility.