Upgrade from ESXi free edition to Essentials

[krhoades]

I have purchased VmWare Essentials.  I have 3 hosts that I need to upgrade.  2 hosts have ESXi 4.0 and 1 host has ESXi 4.1.  I downloaded and installed the Vcenter Server on a Windows 2003 64bit Server and not sure what steps I need to take for my host machines.  I have the host machines booting from an internal USB drive and then all the VM's sit on a RAID5 with 2 datastores.  I want to make sure that I am not going to lose any of my VM's.  My question is Do I just install the new license key or do I have to download 4.1 and reinstall the USB key?  Any help would be greatly appreciated so that I am utilizing what I have purchased.

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

The addition of the license key is all that is necessary. You will not loose any data.

[MauroBonder]

To modify the license you can use the VI Client and go to the configuration tab and select the license features - edit.

[krhoades]

I currently use a seperate instance of the Vsphere client to access each host.  Will I then see all three hosts there or is that where the Vcenter Server comes into play?  Not sure what the Vcenter server is for?

[DSTAVERT]

You will connect the vSphere client to vCenter which will display all three hosts. You might want to go through some of the webcasts training. http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-14673

[krhoades]

Thank you so much for your responses.  I will change my license keys this weekend.

[DSTAVERT]

Good luck. Update this thread with your progress if you have time.

Thanks