Thought on Upgrading ESXi host from 4.1 to 5.0 in a cluster

[fajarpri]

Hi all,

I have cluster:

vCenter 5.0 and several hosts running ESXi 4.1

I want to upgrade the hosts to 5.0.

My question:

- Is there any issue if I do an offline upgrade (using ESXi installer CD).

- How about if I want to do a fresh install of the host? Should I remove the host first from the cluster?

- Should I migrate the VM first off the host for the two methods?

Thanks in advance.

Fajar.

[john23 · Accepted solution]

If you have multiple host in the cluster, you can upgrade the host one by one

-- Put one host in maintenance mode, which you plan to upgrade, so all other vms will need to migrate to other host (without downtime)

-- If you freshly install the host, still datastore you are not going to format, so legacy vmfs3 features will be there, even you upgrade existing datastore.

-- No need to poweroff the vm or host for migration, go with vmotion feature.

-A

[f10]

Also note that using the CD and doing a fresh install will result in losing all the configuration, to name few: Management IP, Standard Switch settings, DNS & NTP config. and any advanced settings. I suggest that you use the .zip file that is available to upgrade from ESXi 4.1 to 5.0.

-f10

http://highoncloud.blogspot.in/

About VMware Virtualization on NetApp

[abhilashhb]

- Is there any issue if I do an offline upgrade (using ESXi installer CD).

There is no issue in upgrading the host using the offline method. You will have to migrate the machines off the host to another host so that the VM's are not affected. Then upgrade the host.

- How about if I want to do a fresh install of the host? Should I remove the host first from the cluster?

If its fresh installation then you don't have to remove the host. Just do the same thing as the first answer i gave. Move the VM's to another host using vMotion and then do the fresh install.

- Should I migrate the VM first off the host for the two methods?

Any maintenance you do on a host, its expected you migrate the VM's off the host so that it will not affect the Vm's running on it.