Best Process to Install ESX4.1 on a host

[rudybrewster]

Hi

I already have an ESX 4.1 cluster of three nodes, with vSphere on a 64 bit Windows 2008 VM, with NFS exports from our SAN as datastores for the VMs, and I want to add a new ESX host to take that to a cluster of four.

I have a server that is exactly the same as my other hosts, but it is completely blank at the moment.

What would you say is the best way to get ESX installed on it and then add it to the cluster to ease the load a bit for me? Previously I've just upgraded the existing hosts from 3.5 to 4.1, so that's been easy (ish)

Any help/guides appreciated, thanks guys.

[WaffleSniffer · Accepted solution]

Hi

IMO, as you are only dealing with one host, the quickest way to install ESX would be the good old fashioned install from DVD and run through the wizard.  While it's certainly quicker with a scripted install, the time spent sorting out and testing the script, you could have installed ESX many times over, and you only really see the benefit when woring with a large number of hosts..

One other thing to mention, incase you've overlooked it, have you checked your license for vCenter?  As you had 3 hosts initially, did you purchase the Foundation version, if so you'd need to upgrade it to use all four hosts.

Hope this helps

Adam

[rudybrewster]

Hi Adam,

I thought that might be the case, I just wondered if there was a better way to do it after seeing how smooth the upgrade could be using the vCenter baselines, but as you say scripting will be a bit pointless for me, especially as we wont be expanding again (in the forseeable future anyway)

We bought the enterprise licence (or equivialent, I can't remember what it was called) so we could expand should we need to.

If I do a basic DVD install and then add the host into the cluster, I can still apply all my cluster settings through vCenter, and I assume that's the suggested route?

[WaffleSniffer]

Hi

Yeah, you can configure the host using vCenter once you've added it to the cluster, if you've got Enterprise Plus licenses, then of course you can host profiles to make it a lot easier  😃

Good luck!  😃

Adam

[rudybrewster]

Yeah I wish we'd bought that now, host profiles look great!

Thanks for all your help.

[bckirsch]

The host profiles are the way to go but if you didn't get them you can pull out the config using PowerShell and then re-apply those settings to the new host.  It's like a manual host profile tool.