Upgrading vCenter 4.1 to 5

[peter79]

Guys,

I'm planning on doing an upgrade of vCenter from 4.1 to 5.  I've installed vCenter before as well as migrated from a 32 bit to 64 vCenter and it wently fairly smoothly.

I've done some research on upgrading to 5 and looks okay.

Has anyone here done this themselves?

If so how did it go?

What are the risks and what type of downtime could I expect?

Any info or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Troy_Clavell]

as long as you have a good backup of your vCenter DB, you should be good.  We did however hit the issue talked about in the below KB

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2007231

So, I would suggest going to vCenter5 U1 to avoid the above issue.

[Kahonu84]

Aloha,

We made the jump from 4.1 U1 to 5.0 U1 in our test environment a week or so ago. Upgrade was in-place and about as brain dead easy as it could be. Took 30 minutes.

Bill

[MauroBonder]

This is a official guide to upgrade - is very interessant for you http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-upgrade...

[schepp]

Upgraded form 4.1 to 5 a few weeks ago. Mounted the ISO, ran setup, clicked continue a few times and the upgrade was done without any downtime.

Had Backups of the vCenter and VUM Databases of course

Regards

[Appnet201110141]

For those in place upgrades...I'm assuming you had a x64 SQL installed? I am looking at upgrading a client running 4.1 U1 to 5.0 U1, but I noticed that SQL 2008 Express R2 x86 is NOT supported as well as 2008 R2 x64 NOT being supported with 4.1 U1...

Looks like I can either upgrade to 4.1 U2, install 2008 R2 Exp x64 on the same box and migrade the DBs....or

upgrade to 4.1 U2 then either do an inplace sql upgrade/migration to x64 or use the 5.0 U1 ISO to install on seperate server and migrate the DBs for me?

What would you recommend for best practice with this...seems a bit confusing...

[Kahonu84]

Do you have a real SQL server you can use as opposed to SQL Express?? Going this route may make this upgrade more diffiicult, but in the end future upgrades will be MUCH easier.

[Appnet201110141]

only using express atm with this client...

[Appnet201110141]

Any other recommendations on the best way to proceed?