Difference between Patches and Upgrades in vCenter Server 4 ?

[TonyJK]

We just upgrade vCenter to Release 4. The ESX Hosts are still running ESX 3.5 U5.

When we run update manager, we observe that there are two checkboxes - Patches and Upgrade. We suppose that patches is for ESX Host 3.5 and upgrade for ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4. Is this correct ?

When we run update manager with both checkboxes selected, it does show up the patches we have to apply for those ESX 3.5 Hosts. However, there is no upgrade shows up for us to upgrade from ESX 3.5 U5 to vSphere. Is there any suggestion ?

Thanks

[petkom · Accepted solution]

Hi Tony,

Upgrade checkbox is when you want to scan your host for upgrade compliance - for instance if it is 3.5 and you want to do an upgrade to 4.0

Patches checkbox is related to 3.5 and 4.0 host but only for patching like rollups, updates and individual patches. That's the main difference - Changing the host version from 3.5 to 4.0 is done by upgrade and moving from 3.5 U1 to U2 is patching.

If you want to check what patches you need - create dynamic host patch baseline. For upgrade you should upload 4.0 iso to host upgrade baseline and remediate with it

hph,

Petko