VMware vSphere 4.x was released for general availability nearly two years ago and now vSphere 5.x is rumored for release later this year. In June 2009, virtualization master Scott Lowe wrote a blog post illustrating the roughly 16 manual steps to upgrade virtual machines to VMxNet3 adapters and Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) controllers. Interestingly, two years following I still encounter larger environments that are not fully taking advantage of the performance characteristics of these two virtual machine hardware types. The reason is simple, this 16 step process can take up to 30 minutes of downtime per virtual machine if done manually, [...]