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.
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.
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
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...
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
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...
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.
only using express atm with this client...
Any other recommendations on the best way to proceed?