Upgading from View 4.6 to 5.0 or 5.1??

[giddyup]

Hello,

In the process of planning the upgrade from View 4.6 to either 5.0 or 5.1.

Currently running on ESXi 4.1.0,348481 and vCenter 4.1.0 build 345043.

Since this is a production environment should I first upgrade to View 5.0 then upgrade to ESXi and vCenter/composer to 5.0?

Then once all of the environment is on VMware 5.0, upgrade to View 5.1 later?

Any advise from anyone who has been through the trench is appreciated.

Thanks

[Eppich]

I just went through this about a month ago.  I completely skipped ESXi 5.0 and View 5.0.  My experience was a nightmare due to vShield and Trend Micro Deep Security 7.5.  We were running ESX 4.1 U1 and View 4.6(3 hosts and about 125 VMs).  I ended up upgrading vCenter to 5.1.0a which was a pain due to the SSO(single sign on) portion of the install.  I also had to upgrade the SQL version on my vCenter server.  I couldn't get Update Manager to successfully upgrade my hosts so I ended up installing ESXi 5.1 from scratch.  After ESXi was installed on all the hosts I upgraded View which took me about 45 minutes to do 2 connection servers, 1 security server, 1 transfer server and 1 composer server.  The View upgrade was definitely the easy part.  Hopefully you're not running vShield.

Goodluck...

[giddyup]

Eppich thanks for the reply!!    I am also running vshield and deep security 7.5

What issue's did you have with vshield endpoint and deep security?

Sounds like I'm best just upgrading to view 5.0 for now.

[Eppich]

There are a couple of lines in each virtual machine's .vmx file that needed to be removed.  I forget exactly what they were there for but it prevented me from migrating VMs to different hosts.  Here's a link to some good information on this:  http://communities.vmware.com/thread/344682

I had a lot of problems because of this after I upgraded View to 5.1.1.  I went in to my base images and uninstalled the vShield Enpoint Driver, Upgraded the View agent, upgraded VM Tools w/Endpoint Driver and then upgraded the Virtual Hardware version.  Next, I tried to recompose one of my pools and the process got stuck because the VMs wouldn't power on due to the lines in the .vmx files.  It would just cycle between trying to power on and then it would fail, over and over again.  I ended removing those line from the base images and detaching each user's persistant disk and then recreating the desktop from the disk that way I would get a brand new VM without the VFILE lines.

We wanted to upgrade everything including vShield and Trend Micro.  The thing you'll want to do is decommission those components in the correct order.  I started with the deactivating the Trend Virtual Appliances and then restoring ESX.  Then remove vCenter from the Trend Deep Security Manger.  I think I even deactivated each computer too.  Not sure if this was necessary.  Next, I uninstalled the Endpoint from each host and then removed vCenter from the vShield Manager.  Instead of upgrading everything I just built it from scratch including a new SQL DB for Trend 8.0 SP1.  I'm not sure if I did everything I was supposed too.  I would hope I missed something because this was a nightmare.  I spent 26 hours on this one weekend and then another 8-10 on re-installing trend the next weekend.

Goodluck...

[giddyup]

ouch...

The deep security thread has some good info!!!

Thanks again for sharing your upgrade experience!!!

[krismcewan]

as a consultant id say go to 5.0 first unless there is somethign in 5.1 that you really need.

my professional feeling is 5.1 was not 100% ready for GA and there will be numerous patches in the coming months.

every 5.1 deployment i have done whether it be fresh or upgrade has given numerous problems.

[giddyup]

Krismcewan thanks for your sharing your upgrade/install experiences.  I'll be going the 5.0 route!