Upgrade ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4.1?

[digitlman77]

I've been looking through the release notes, and it doesn't seem clear to me that I can upgrade from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4.1.

It is spelled out that you can go from ESXi 3.5 to ESXi 4.1, but what about from ESX 3.5? Can I upgrade, or do I need to do a fresh install?

[RParker · Accepted solution]

ESX 3.5? Can I upgrade, or do I need to do a fresh install?

Can't mix types i to i or ESX to ESX, you can't "upgrade" ESX(i) to ESX or vice versa. So a fresh install is needed.

[digitlman77]

OK.

I'll plan to do a re-install from CD.

[DSTAVERT]

If you have local storage and just want to get up and running with ESXi you can install ESXi directly to a USB stick. ESXi will find the datastore but you will need to recreate the networking and re add the VMs to inventory.

[digitlman77]

That's an interesting idea.

In the current set-up, all I have is a local RAID5. All ESX and VMs are on the same device. Even though I will do a full Veaam backup before I begin, I'm afraid that a fresh install will wipe out the entire partition. As I recall, during the setup, you can choose to leave the partition structure intact and just format the existing partitions. I guess I just like to be extra safe when doing installs where existing data would like to be retained.