ESXi 6.0 upgrade from ESXi 5.1 using VMware Update manager

[VMADMINAAA]

Hi all, we have been testing different ways to upgrade to ESXi 6.0 U1 from ESXi 5.1 and the easiest way so far it looks like doing an upgrade with Vmware Update manager. Can someone share their experience and gotchas or issues they ran into when using VUM as the primary  upgrade method? we would greatly appreciate it.

One thing i noticed is that when the upgrade is complete the Local Storage and I'm assuming all the other partitions are still at the 5.58 level instead of 5.61? I know i can format the local storage partition since we don't use it for permanent files, but do i have to be concerned about this regarding the root partition and others?

Please let me know.

Thank you

[rcporto]

The easiest way to upgrade hosts is using the Update Manager and this is my preferred method, but if you have just few hosts a good option is do a fresh install that will clean up all old stuff in your host that may can cause you problems in the future. But, depending of the number of hosts you have, it will lead to a lot of administrative effort.

[VMADMINAAA]

Thank you we have over 200 hosts in different locations all over the states and we have always done a clean install which by the way takes about 3 months or so do perform. This is the first year we want to do the upgrade using VUM and i just want to see what kind of experiences other companies have had in the past and if there is anything to lookout for.

Again, the only thing i don't like so far is the fact that the Local vmfs is not upgraded to current version 5.61. Other than that it looks fine but again, i don't know what other files are left behind and that might cause issues in the future.

Thank you for sharing your information, can you let me know if you had any issues either with SRM, SySlog server, storage devices and their tools such as compression, acceleration etc. what about VRops, VMturbo or any other third party tools that can be integrated.

Again, i've done about 10 hosts so far and i've been testing for about two weeks with no adverse results, i just want to get more feedback from other companies and see if we are meeting enterprise standards.

Thank you again. and i'll wait for your reply.

Regards,