Delay reboot for VMware tools upgrade

[jbruns2019]

I want to upgrade VMware tools on Windows 2019 servers going from 10.3.5 to 11.2.6 and may not have luxury of a reboot after.  We do patch every 30 days so eventually a reboot will occur.

Does anyone know if a reboot can be delayed after the upgrade safely?

[TheSleepyAdmin]

Hi Jbruns2019

I have upgrade VMware tools without rebooting on a good few critical servers and the only issue I have seen is sometimes the server would lose network connect but this was pretty rare.

You could also set the server to auto upgrade VMware tools during reboots in the VM advanced settings, we do this for most of our servers so they install the latest VMware tools during our Windows patching cycle. 

[jbruns2019]

I saw it loose connectivity for about 10s during the upgrade.  I am more afraid of after but before the reboot.  I am using puppet to control the version of this and many things, so I cannot let VMware do it for me on next boot.

[TheSleepyAdmin]

Ok, If the VMware tools upgrade and there are no issue with the NIC or any other drivers at the time. Then it should be fine to leave the reboot till the patching happens. 

[pdirmann01]

To add another perspective, I agree with @TheSleepyAdmin. I've upgraded many servers holding out on the rebooting and have only run into a few issues. One of them being a "perfect storm" where it was a a 2-node SQL cluster with a file share witness. The passive node just happened to be quarantined by InfoSec for a non-related issue. When VMware tools hit the File Share Witness server, which had 2 interfaces (LAN and iSCSI), for some reason it consolidated the LAN IP over to the iSCSI interface as well so it lost network connectivity and the cluster lost quorum which caused it to freak out. Again, super rare "perfect storm" situation.

Obviously, if you want to be safe, do it closer to patch schedule (and with a change! 🙂 )