Hi, everybody!
I've spent a whole day trying to upgrade my esxi 3.5 embedded hosts and I've not succeeded yet.
Lets start it from scratch:
We have IBM BladeCenter full of 14 IBM BladeServers 22XM, each of them has 2gb USB flash drive inside with VMWare Esxi 3.5 Embedded INTL and 28 Socket Enterprise Plus Licenses for vSphere.
I want to upgrade them to Esxi 4 Update 1.
At first I tried to use VSphere Host Update Utility, with update.zip (this bundle I've downloaded from vmware.com, this is an upgrade bundle of Esxi 4 update 1 installable from Esxi 3.5) but it failed with an error "Input string was not in a correct format". Ok, later i've investigated that VMWare VSphere Host Update Utility can update only Esxi 4 hosts. Not very good news, but Ok, lets move on!
Then I tried to upgrade vihostupdate utility from VSphere CLI. I've installed VSphere CLI and tried to launch vihostupdate.pl and have got an error that dll libxml2.dll cannot be found. I've updated environment variable PATH with the path to CLI bin directory and I've rebooted server. Ok, vihostupdate.pl returned me usage information. I've enered command to upgrade my esxi:
vihostupdate35.pl -server 172.x.x.187 -username root -password xxx -i -b c:\update.zip
But recieved an error:
Error connecting to server at 'https://172.x.x.187/sdk/webService': Login failed due to a bad username or password
I've remembered that there was some trouble with typing credentials in command promt and have deleted password option for entering it manually:
vihostupdate35.pl -server 172.x.x.187 -username root -i -b c:\update.zip
And after entering password, I've recieved a new error:
unpacking c:\1.zip ...
Unable to parse \metadata.xml at C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin\
vihostupdate35.pl line 321
main::get_bundle_info('\metadata.xml') called at C:\Program Files\VMware
\VMware vSphere CLI\bin\vihostupdate35.pl line 236
main::install_update('HostSystem=HASH(0x4f0fcc0)', '\metadata.xml') call
ed at C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin\vihostupdate35.pl line 122
End Disconnect
Ok, I've extracted update.zip to temporary directory and used another command:
vihostupdate35.pl -server 172.x.x.187 -username root -i -m c:\tmp\metadata.xml
And have got another erorr:
does not apply to target host (embeddedEsx 3.5.0 INTL)
But I didn't find anywhere in VMWare documents or in google that I cannot upgrade ESXi 3.5 embedded to ESXi 4 update 1. Can anybody help me?
I heard that there are some CIM Providers that exist on ESXI embedded to better utilize monitoring features, and I want not to lose them if it is possible.
