I am planning to do a clean installation on our cluster of 11 hosts. I like to start fresh and the installation from scratch can be done in less than an hour

Hello,

ESX v3.5 is a major vmkernel update and vmware tools change, but the revision of the SC has not really changed. An update is also just fine. I did this and have had no issues at all. If you were going from RHEL3 U6 (Service Console) to RHEL4 (Service Console) equivs, then I would advocate a complete reinstall, but when the only real changes are the vmware tools and some minor patches to the RedHat SC tools, there is no need to reinstall. This is from the Linux perspective.


Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator
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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. Available on Rough Cuts at http://safari.informit.com/9780132302074

Depends on how happy you are with the ESX server, we have always had one server that was a problem box, which I could never really work out what was wrong, it would 99% of the time work fine, but just occasonally it would do some strange things. Did the upgrade to 3.5 using ESXupdate, that failed, and found other people had seen the same, and suggested updating from the CD, that worked fine, just it now runs any VM machine so very slow, that it is heading for a rebuild.

So I think in future it will be clean install.

I apologize for hijacking this thread, but it seems like everybody on here knows pretty much about the upgrade to 3.5. I did an upgrade of my 19 ESX servers and a clean install of 8 additional servers. My 19 upgraded ESX servers run perfect, with the exception of the DRS memory bug. The 8 clean installs are very sluggish and mostly unresponsive. These 8 servers are so bad that I haven't put them into production because I can't add a port group without my VI Client timing out. Any thoughts?

firedog, you know there is a possible fix for the memory bug?

http://communities.vmware.com/message/848312

There's indeed one drawback of vi 3.5 and that is the memory bug as descibed in the above thread. luckily there is a patch for it. and it works for me quite well.

i upgraded from VI 3.0.2 i installed all patches first and then upgraded and they work very good, a new install i did not do yet. i just got a new server in so i will be doing these in a few days.

Hi *,
in my experience it's alway good idea to do a clean install to avoid any update issues and to leave old trash behind.

If you have to manage a bulk of ESX hosts I would think about an automated deployment (PXE, Kickstart, etc.), so
you just have to reboot the servers using PXE, get a cup of coffee and enjoy watching your ESX hosts installation...

Ok, it's not that easy to create an automatic deployment environment, but it's a great assistence once it's running.

Cheers,
David

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