Upgrading from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4.1

[nikheelkumar16]

Hii All,

Could you all please guide me a way to upgrade esx 3.5 to esxi 4.1 with Very Minimum Down Time,  Since it's a Banking Sector

Please cut out the Idea of upgrading it to esxi5.0 since it is still yet under testing Env.

Thanks in Advance.

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the VMware Communities forums.

There is no direct upgrade path from ESX to ESXi 4.x.  In a multi host deployment though you could minimize downtime with this upgrade plan

1) Upgrade vCenter to 4.1

2) Migrate all VMs from a single host

3) Install ESXi onto the host, join vCenter and config the host as required

4) Migrate some VMs to the ESXi 4.1 host to free up another host and repeat the upgrade process.

Once the hosts are all on ESXi 4.1 you can change the hardware version.  You can upgrade VMware Tools to the 4.1 version pretty much at any time.

I'd suggest the following book at is deals with migrating from ESX to ESXi - “VMware ESXi: Planning, Implementation, and Security”

[marchlam]

Hi,

As I know, there were KB and youtube which help you to upgrade from ESXi3.5 to 4.1 (1022104)

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102210...

Upgrading to ESX 4.1 and vCenter Server 4.1 best practices

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0wSHPSvmpk

It can apply to ESX 3.5

There were 3 part describe in KB , but actually there were one more part for your Guest VM.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101067...

Upgrading a virtual machine to the latest hardware version

Thanks!

MC