ESXI Upgrade Recommendation Needed

[HBADMIN]

Hello folks.   I would love a recommendation. 

I'm an MCSE with basic daily VM task experience but my company is lacking anyone VM Certified or with experience doing upgrades.   I've inherited the following situation: 

2 Dell Servers, a thousand miles apart, each running ESXI as 2 separate hosts under one Datacenter.   There are 13 virtual machines between them. 

The last time my company upgraded ESXI, they hired a consultant who accidentally wiped the entire environment.  They were down for a week.   Paranoia now reins supreme.

I am looking for a recommendation.   We are running ESXI and VSphere 5.0.0 and I have the following goals:  

- Upgrade as high as we can go to keep up with the times

- Gain the ability to use Server 2012 in the environment (New Virtual servers or upgrade).  Not currently an option. 

- Keep our 2003 and 2008 virtual servers going until we gradually get them moved (could be a long haul).  Can't lose 2003 and 2008 functionality (I've heard that in 5.5 we lose 2003 functionality)

- Not risk accidentally wiping the environment or causing another catastrophe

This is a small company that didn't pay for support other than upgrade rights.  I called support to see if walking me through this would even be covered under a $299 support incident and they can't really answer me.  

What would you recommend?   I have a lot of confidence in my ability to figure things out, but this is too critical to take risks but I really don't know how simple or complex the answer will be.  If something goes wrong, we don't have the experience to know how to fix it.    Knowing what you know, would you try your luck with a support incident or are we best served by a VM certified consultant? 

[CoolRam]

If you are running microsoft cluster service than before upgrade the environment go through this KB

VMware KB: Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) support on ESXi/ESX

If before making any suggestion for upgrade we would like to have some question.

I.e. are you using cluster with HA ,DRS enabled .

You VM is protected  and you can afford the downtime while upgrading the environment .

[HBADMIN]

No clustering has been used. 

We do Veeam backups if that's what you mean by protected?  Yes, we can afford some downtime at night to upgrade.

Because I've never personally upgraded any VMWare products, I'm concerned about the risk level and how the environment could have been wiped last time.  You just don't know what you don't know. 

[CoolRam]

Since you cna afford the downtime of the VM than Please do follow the below steps nothing gone scrap in your environment.

Steps:

1. First  check the hardware is compatible with the VMware 5.5 Update release (VMware HCL).

2. Download the update-from-esxi5.5-5.5_update02.zip Bundle and copy that in /vmfs/volumes/<your data store > in each host.

3. Run the command "esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/<your datastore>/downloaded Zip Bundle"

4. you will get listed with the profile

5. Now run the command esxcli software profile update  -d /vmfs/volumes/<your datastore>/downloaded Zip Bundle -p <give Standard profile which is listed in the last out of 4 profile  >

6. You will get the message your host is updated successuffy . you need to reboot.

7. Before Reboot the HOST please do migrate or power OFF the VM.

Follow the same step in other ESXI host .

[Alistar]

Hi there,

What you need to do first is to upgrade your vCenter Server to the version that you plan install on your ESXi hosts. If you would be going to 5.5U2 on ESXi, you will need to upgrade vCenter Server it to that version. The same goes for vCenter Server 6.0 etc. Then and only then you can upgrade and manage the ESXi hosts that are included in its release. Make sure that all preemptive actions (consistent database backup, enough downtime) are in order before you start the upgrade.

To do it the least invasive way without using the ESXi shell, could you build one additional VM that would host the VMware Update Manager? Or even better, if your policy allows to, install it on the newly upgraded vCenter Server - if you have a Windows based machine running that. With the help of VUM you can upgrade your ESXi host with offical packages downloaded straight from VMware's repositories. There is plenty of documentation to go around on this cause, see the main Update Manager documentation here: vSphere Update Manager Documentation.

Any further questions you have, please ask.

Good luck!

[ashleymilne]

Have you looked into the web client for 5.5? If not I would do so, I hated it and have kept most of my customers at 5.1U3 which I believe would still allow you to keep your 2003 environment but also utilize Server 2012R2. Eventually I will have to upgrade and use the web client, for now however I am staying at 5.1U3. As other have said, you have to upgrade VCenter first then the hosts, but its straightforward upgrading the hosts, boot off the CD, do the upgrade while maintaining the datastore, then upgrade the vmware tools on each VM after.