Strategy to upgrade vCenter to 4.1

[aadan]

I've got vCenter 4.0 running on a physical Windows 2008 32-bit server using a remote SQL 2008 database. I've got six ESX 4.0 servers attached to vCenter.

To upgrade to vCenter 4.1 on the physical server, I was thinking I would:

1. Create a new VM with Windows 2008 64-bit

2. Shutdown the physical vCenter server

3. Rename the newly created VM to the same host name as the physical vCenter server and give it the same IP

4. Install vCenter 4.0 on the new Windows 2008 64-bit VM and point to the existing database

(At this point vCenter should work just as it did before I started, right?)

5. Do an in-place upgrade to 4.1 of vCenter that's running on the new VM

6. Install Windows 2008 64-bit on the physical server

7. Shutdown the new VM running vCenter 4.1

8. Rename the physical server to same as vCenter server and assign same IP

9. Install vCenter 4.1 and point to existing database.

Will this work? Is there a better/easier way to do this? Am I overlooking or oversimplifying anything? All of the guest VMs should be able to remain running though all this, right?

Thanks,

Alfie

[GreatWhiteTec]

That should work just fine. You could also P2V the physical server, everything would run as normal at that point. In the mean time you can wipe the physical server>install 64 bit OS and pick up your plans of renaming etc... This may be a quicker "upgrade path".

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[vmroyale]

Hello.

Check out kb 5850444, if you want to take this approach. Why not use the upgrade procedures (data migration tool) in the Upgrade Guide to install vCenter 4.1 on a new 64-bit VM? Then you could move back to physical hardware, or just leave vCenter on the VM.

Good Luck!

[Troy_Clavell]

I don't understand why you would do this multiple times. If you want to install vCenter on your physical server, just wipe it out and start over with vCenter 4.1, connecting back to your existing DB.

If you want to move your vCenter Host OS to a VM, then deploy a new VM, install vCenter and connect back to an existing DB.

Although your steps will work, it just seems like work not needed.

[aadan]

Why not use the upgrade procedures (data migration tool) in the Upgrade Guide to install vCenter 4.1 on a new 64-bit VM?

I didn't think the data migration tool could be used if your database was on SQL 2008.

[aadan]

Thanks for the feedback. It sounds like I am over complicating this.

My reasoning for all of this was to preserve a working vCenter for as long as possible in case things did not go well. But I guess the key here is the database. And since it's not going anywhere, this may not be all that big of a deal.

[Troy_Clavell]

.....But I guess the key here is the database. And since it's not going anywhere, this may not be all that big of a deal.

exactly. For me, I like to stick to the KISS principle

[vm-au-user]

I'm planning on doing something similar, can I do the following?

1) P2V the the VCenter 4.0 and SQL 2005 - This system as hold the database

2) Wipe the hardware - Install Win2k8 and SQL 2008 STD

3) Install VSphere 4.1 with a new database

4) Detach the VC and Update manager databases on the source machine and attach to the new machine overwriting the existing databases.

or

4a) Use the Vmware Data Migration tool.

5) if all works well, Power off the VM and Rename the Physical. (use the rename VCenter KB Article)

Couple of questions

1) Can I migrate the database form SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 without issue?

2) Do I need to upgrade the VC database for use with 4.1

[aadan]

So I finally completed this and it really wasn't as big a deal as I had first thought it might be.

The steps I took:

1. Backed up my remote SQL 2008 vCenter database
   
2. P2V my 32bit vCenter 4.0 and shut down my physical vCenter server
   
3. Brought up my new virtual vCenter 4.0 server and verified that it worked....It did. (I did this so I could have access to vCenter while I worked on the physical server and it gave me a backup of the server since I was going to need to reformat it.)
   
4. I installed Windows 2008 x64 on my physical server and gave it a new name and IP. (In hindsight, it might have been better to use the original host name.)
   
5. Shutdown my virtual vCenter 4.0 server and installed vCenter 4.1 on the physical server and pointed it to my existing remote SQL 2008 database.  (Had to create 64 bit DSN)
   

Everything worked great.....except I couldn't get VUM to install.  The install kept failing with Error 25085.

After a little digging, it turned out that this was caused by references to the old vCenter host name that were still in the database.  Since I used a new name for the vCenter 4.1 physical server, that caused this problem.  This KB gave me instructions how to fix it:  http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1024795