host patching, best way to achieve this

[queensbridgeitt]

Hi

Hopefully this is an easy question for all you VMware admins.

I am running a 3 host esx4 cluster and very soon I want to look at patching these hosts up to a later level as I am having a few issues with our 2008R2 VM's and I think its because we are on our hosts the version which has 2008 R2 in is classed as experimental mode.

1 Host is running 175625 and the other 2 are running 164006 and want to get them all onto ESX4U2 (basically the one that before the latest one which doesnt require a 64bit vCenter server (we are running vcenter on a 32bit server and need to wait a while till we can order a newer server).

What is the best way to patch these hosts up? I was thinking of moving all VM's to 2 hosts, patch 1 host fully, reboot the host once its upgraded and then move all VM's onto the host just patched and then do the other one and so on.

Is it worth waiting a while between upgrading each host or can this be done one after the other just moving VM's from one host to another? All servers are identical and are HP DL380G5 with all of them having 32gb RAM. We have enough capacity to run all VM's on 2 servers if one went down for maintenance or other.

Our vcenter server as the update module installed, am I right in saying I can just roll the rollup package for esx4u2 onto each host through the update module?

Any advice will be most appreciated.

[a_p_]

Our vcenter server as the update module installed, am I right in saying I can just roll the rollup package for esx4u2 onto each host through the update module?

That's actually what VMware recommends. Using Update Manager is the preferred method to do the update.

...we are running vcenter on a 32bit server and need to wait a while till we can order a newer server ...

Are there any reasons why you don't run vCenter Server as a VM. This works perfectly.

André

[queensbridgeitt]

I heard that was a bad idea in case something went horribly wrong with the cluster (which is very doubtful mind you). I just been told that its not good to have your eggs in one basket.

Do VMware recommend this?

[queensbridgeitt]

If I wanted to do this at some point, Is there a guide I can follow which will allow me to create a new 64bit vCenter box and move the configuration from the 32bit server to the new one?

[a_p_]

Running vCenter Server in a VM is fully supported by VMware. This way you can benefit from vMotion, HA, Snapshots, ... which increases the availability of vCenter Server. I did a lot of installations and I never installed vCenter Server on a physical system!

For migrating the vCenter Server to 4.1 take a look at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_upgrade_guide.pdf

André

[a_p_]

Mike Laverick posted an article about VMware best practices: Why virtualise vCenter? in May.

André

[LucasAlbers]

on the 30th they released 4.0u2 + 1 patch.

So you might as well patch to latest 4.0 release.

[queensbridgeitt]

Hi All

I was about to begin looking at updating the cluster and hosts to the latter updates but noticed that on the data centre and cluster view on the update manager tab I cannot see one of my hosts.

I have tryed to scan and check the settings of the host but it seems to be in order, the host isn't offline

Is there a reason why I cannot see this particular host?

Thanks

[queensbridgeitt]

I was about to attempt to update the hosts when I noticed that different version of ESX were installed on each host.

In vcenter it was saying 1 host was on version 164009 and the other 2 were on 175625.

That was odd because I have never done any updating and I know for certain they were all on version 164009 when we upgraded to vsphere.

I doubled checked this on each host using SSH and can confirm that all version were on 164009.

Does anyone know why vcenter is giving me different information? Could it be a bug?

Thanks