esx 3.5 u4 to esx 4 u1 - using VUM

[GFFG]

Hi guys,

I am planning to upgrade our farm and I have question regarding space.

In my notes it says to have 10GB of free space available to perform the upgrade.

My farm is HA/DRS on Blades with local SSD storage , free space on esx servers is 5gb.

My question is, I have downloaded the ISO for ESX4 U1 to Vcenter. After I'm done upgradeing the vcenter,client and um I plan on loading the Viclient and performing the update using VUM.

Do I copy up the ISO to our NFS storage which houses all our VM'S and point VUM to it?

I won't be using the host utility because they are not STAND ALONE ESX's.

[runclear]

Once you upgrade vsphere, yyou can then use the VUM tool - create a "upgrade" baseline, and in that process, you will be prompted to "upload" the vpshere iso..

For the space, im pretty sure the esx4 defaults are,

600MB = Swap

5GB = /

2GB = /var/log

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[GFFG]

Ok, on page 52 of my vmware vsphere 4:whats new book it says, In case of upgrade failure, the process supports roll back to the previous version. A minimum of 10gb of free space is required on the VMFS datastore in order to create the service console VMDK.

I assume NFS would work just as well as VMFS.

I suppose I read it wrong, it's "if" the update fails that it will require this 10 gb of space. So the VUM manager will look inside the ISO and find the necessary files and copy them to over locally to the ESX? I'd assume less than a 1 GB I'd imagine!!!

Regards, Kyle

[DSTAVERT]

ESX 4 won't do a regular install with less than 10GB available

[runclear]

The upgrade will fail if there is less than 10GB free ....

If for whatever reason the upgrade does fail, you are correct - the installer will back out and "revert back to original"

I have tested this a few times , ie: started a upgrade and cancelled it mid way, pulled the powercord etc... pretty neat watching it roll back 😛

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[DSTAVERT]

The COS is now like a regular VM. If you have a test set up I would run through it before doing any upgrades.

[GFFG]

So straight to the point. When I load Vcenter and browse local storage "/" it has about 5.94 GB FREE. So this is a no go for upgrade then?

Regards, Kyle

[enDemand]

The problem you may run into is the fact that you say you only have 5GB of free space, though. If you're doing an upgrade instead of a clean install, the installer will check your existing "/boot" to make sure that it has adequate space. That's the 1st checkpoint. If it does, it will reuse it. Then you'll need either an existing VMFS datastore on boot disk with sufficient space or enough space to create one.

The problem you may run into if a new VMFS partition is needed is that 5GB won't house the various partitions created inside the service console's VMDK.

You'll need:

1600 for swap

5GB for /

2GB for /var/log

I went with all defaults on my upgrade, and the service console VMDK is 8.5GB alone.

[runclear]

Do you have the option to create a VMFS volume, and boot from SAN? probably not ideal for you.. but sounds like unless you swap those drives out - you might be stuck like chuck.

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[GFFG]

Thanks for the detailed response. I am not understanding that this 10gb requirement is if you ran a clean boot and was setting up esx from scratch. All the partition information you speak of was set when I first setup up esx 3.5 u4 months ago. So all in all I should be just fine..

Regards, Kyle

[GFFG]

I could boot from SAN but am not going to.

Regards, Kyle

[enDemand]

When you installed ESX 3.5, you actually created various physical partitions on your boot disk. However, with an upgrade to ESX 4, the only partition that is re-used is /boot. ESX 4's service console uses a VMDK that is created on a VMFS3 formatted partition during install, and the new partitions (/, swap, etc.) are contained inside that VMDK. So you have to have enough space for it. Your old partitions that you had previously will be mounted as "/esx3-installation/...". They are still there, but they're not used for ESX 4. For example, I had /dev/sda and /dev/sdb previously containing my ESX 3 partitions. Those partitions still exist...however, my new filesystems are on a /dev/sdc, which is backended by the VMDK that was created during the install/upgrade of ESX 4. So you'll need space for that. Hope that explains it a bit.

[GFFG]

Thanks endemand. After you explain it that way, it really does look like I don't have enough free space for a new partition to be created on local storage. I may have to decommission the blade and then blow away the old esx and create a new one. Wow , crappy. That sucks...

Regards, Kyle

[GFFG]

What is ironic is the agent pre-upgrade check says both esx's pass. Must not check local storage space.

Regards, Kyle

[enDemand]

Kyle, I think it only checks the space of /boot. I know...seems like a partial check. One option that you may want to consider, while potentially unsupported, is resizing some of your filesystems. Do you have everything under /, or did you break out /home, /var, /tmp, or other as a separate filesystem? If you can't free up another 5GB, then yes, you'll probably have to go the route of a clean install.

[GFFG]

Hi Endemand,

I've just refered to my notes regarding the setup of the esx 3.5 u4, I choose the default options and : Partitioning Options

Select ‘Recommended’ / Uncheck “Keep Virtual Machines...” Thus yes you can expect the /var/log and "/" etc...

Thats an idea trying to expand the partition but I don't have a utlitity to do that. The funny thing is the pre-upgrade check passes.

If I were to upgrade the Vcenter etc but then found out I couldn't upgrade the esx using VUM, would everything run okay until I re-installed ESX on the one blade in the cluster while the other serves data?

[GFFG]

I was thinking that the 5gb free in the local storage is the unformatted space. That means the rest of the default partitions must equal about 10 gb or so.

Here it actually states that the pre-check looks for disk space issues:

— A standalone pre-upgrade checker tool is now available as part of the vCenter Server installation media that proactively checks ESX hosts for any potential issues that you might encounter while upgrading vCenter agents on these hosts as part of the vCenter Server upgrade process. You can run this tool independently prior to upgrading an existing vCenter Server instance. The tool can help identify any configuration, networking, disk space or other ESX host-related issues that could prevent ESX hosts from being managed by vCenter Server after a successful vCenter Server upgrade.

Regards, Kyle