Migrate ESX 4.0 to either ESXi 4.1 or 5?

[AmarPatel]

Hi All,

I'm looking at refreshing our existing ESX hardware and migrating from ESX to ESXi.

I'm not sure if I should upgrade to ESXi 5 or just migrate across to ESXi 4.1 and upgrade once ESXi 5 has been in use for a little longer?

Has anyone upgraded to ESXi 5? it'll be great to understand your experience good and bad?

Thanks

Amar

[Troy_Clavell]

I'm not sure if I should upgrade to ESXi 5 or just migrate across to  ESXi 4.1 and upgrade once ESXi has been in use for a little longer?

ESXi has been out for quite sometime (ESXi 3.5). However, if you are referring to ESXi5, then yes, it hasn't been out that long.  For us, we are already running ESXi, so I would say you should migrate (rebuild) to ESXi 4.1U1.  This is only my opinion so take it for what it's worth.  We are probably looking to roll to vSphere5 sometime in Jan. '11

[arturka]

Hi

Has anyone upgraded to ESXi 5? it'll be great to understand your experience good and bad?

Personally I didn't upgraded my servers to ESXi5 but browsing community you can find posts with problems described by users during upgrade. As Troy says, ESXi is for quite a long time, if you don't have specific agents or other third party tools installed on your ESX, you can migrate to ESXi without issues (of course your HW has to be on HCL list )

I have plans to upgrade my production servers when VMware release Update 1 for vSphere5.

BTW. you can have mixed ESX and ESXi in on cluster so you can give a try with ESXi on one or two hosts

Cheers
Artur

Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

[AmarPatel]

Troy, sorry I was reffering to ESXi 5 (I have now updated my orig post as well).

Thank you both for your opinions, much appreciated! I wanted to wait for ESXi 5 U1 too and thought I find out what others are thinking/doing.

Thanks