planning to upgrade to vsphere 4.0 and need help

[vmwareluverz]

anyone has upgraded to vphere 4 yet and any suggestions or steps need to succeed. thanks in advance.

[vJTE]

I have successfully upgraded an 8 ESX server cluster with 60 virtual machines to vSphere 4 from 3.5.

Generally, the easiest and safest way to go about doing it is to seperate the task into 3 phases as outlined here:

Upgrading to vSphere

Also, the 4 videos avaiable outline exactly what steps to perform

I have dual licensing setup also and still am serviceing 2 ESX standalone 3.5 servers with vCenter

Just followed the guide and within 4 days, scheduled my "phase 3" update on my virtual machines and finished up.

--Josh

[azn2kew · Accepted solution]

What types of hosts are you going to upgrade? For the most part, you can use VMware Update Manager to upgrade both ESX4i and vSphere 4.0 because you can't do an in place upgrade with vSphere 4.0 CD. If your environment is less then 10 hosts, then use Host Update Utility to do the upgrade which is easy enough or install VUM plug-in and configured baseline and remediate it massively if you wish and schedule accordingly with VMotion feature so you don't have any downtime or might have to use Storage VMotion if you have to migrate between storages.

Once you've upgraded your hosts to all vSphere 4.0, you have an option to clean up the existing ESX 3.5 /boot and files directory using command "cleanup-esx3" from service console. If for some reasons, you don't like vSphere 4.0 performance you have option to rollback to ESX 3.x state as well by using command line "rollback-to-esx3" which will reconfigure your boot loader and then you can manually remove the service console vmdk folder.

I would start looking at the documentation guide how to do this more effectively with planning ahead of time and prepare here

Steps:

1. backup your database

2. download the license file and upgrade to vCenter 4.0 server and components and point to existing OBDC connection to keep perf data if not clean install.

3. upgrade esx hosts using VUM component

4. upgrade vmware tools and vmware hardware to level 7

There is a 4 steps online video cast presented by VMware its pretty good and solid foundation.

Good luck!

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[DLeid]

Also remember your host hardware has to be 64bits. We are not able to upgrade our 32bit hosts to vsphere and will have to stay with 3.5 until we get new 64bit hardware.

If you find this or any other information helpful or correct, please consider awarding points.

[vmwareluverz]

thanks alot for the instructions and i have print it out for preference also viewing upgrade vsphere video and they look very easy and logical. good news is my hosts are x64 bit aware and good for it. enjoy weekends folks.

[DLeid]

Your welcome,

Thanks - I really looking forward to this weekend - I'm getting burned out.

If you find this or any other information helpful or correct, please consider awarding points.

[kopper27]

is it really required to backup the existing datasbase for VC 2.x?

maybe

dump question but I think it is for just in case something goes

wrong...since I don't need the previous DB duting the installacion