Upgrading ESXi from one version to another. Best practices?

[Real_Rosch]

Hi...

I am running VMWare ESX3i on a machine with a raid10 array. There is just one disk so ESXi and the vmfs containing the vms would be on the same disk. Which is bad.. From all what I know now. See below. Maybe someone knows a trick to get this to work without problems when updating.

First I installed it using 3.5 U2. Everything fine. I installed 3 test vms. Everything nice. A few days later 3.5 U3 appeared and I installed it over my previous installtion. And what happenend? Installation went fine but all my vms were gone. Installation wiped out the disk. Bad. There should definitely be an update mode during installation like it is for ESX 3.5 (without the 'i').

Well. In my case it was not that serious, I was just testing. I tried to find a better solution, to not loose my vms during update. I found a working way (at least it seems so). I'll outline it here.But maybe someone else knows a smarter way...

First I did put ESXi on a USB stick. It works fine since then. The VMs are on the raid10 array. The ESX system is on the usb stick. Everything is configured and works nicely.

So I tried to update it. I am having a second USB stick for testing.I did put ESXi on that stick, too. When I boot from the vanilla second USB stick the system comes up nicely but has no configuration. No license, no network, no datastores etc... That's not so nice.

I started to explore the 2 USB sticks. there are several partitions on it. On is labed "Hypervisor1". There I found a file called "local.tgz". That tarball seems to contain the whole configuration of the ESXi. When I copy it to the second USB stick in the same place, I can boot from there with all configurations intact.

So my upgrade scenario would be if eg. ESXi 3.5 U4 would arrive.

1) Install the new ESXi version on the second USB stick

2) shutdown my ESXi server and unplug the primary USB stick

3) copy the "local.tgz" from the primary to the secondary USB stick.

4) restart my system with the second USB stick

5) keep my fingers crossed

So, is this an ok thing to do?

I know there is also update manager, but I am in a completely seperate network without any access to the internet for updates. So I never tried it. (I also have a virtualcenter foundation license).

Does anybody know a smarter solution?

Thanks in advance,

Roland

[nick_couchman]

First of all, there is an upgrade mode, but it does not involve booting from the install disc. When you install the VMware Infrastructure Client, also select the VMware Update Manager option. This will automatically pick up servers you've connected to with the infrastructure client and will go out and search for updates for each of those servers. You can then apply patches - not just the major updates (U2->U3), but also various patches released for the Tools, client, etc. This is the way to update ESXi. Booting off the install disc wipes the HD completely, as you found out.

As far as the USB boot goes, the configuration is written to the USB stick, so the second USB stick you have is not going to have any of the configuration information. Updating USB sticks should be done the same way - if you need to duplicate the USB stick to another one, you can use the dd command (in Linux) to read from one stick and write to the other - this should give you a good "backup" stick complete with configuration.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

See this page for a few methods of install updates for ESXi - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Patch_3i_without_VC.php.

[Real_Rosch]

Hi Nick...

Thanks for your reply...

I know about update manager, but unfortunately (as already mentioned in my initial post) I am completely cut off the internet in an isolated network, so Update Manager cannot pick up anything from the internet.

Because of USB stick configuration thingy... As I already mentionend I found the configuration on the USB stick and I am able to copy it from one stick to the other. I tried it it works without problems. The only concern I have here is what is about changes in the config. Eg. There would be Update 4 or an ESXi 3.6 bringing changes to the config structure. Is the config on the stick automatically updated to meet the new structure?

Again thanks for your reply,

Roland

[Real_Rosch]

Hi Dave...

Thanks for the link. I will see what's there...

Roland