Upgrading 2 Enterprise 3.5 U4 farm's to 3.5 U5 - quick questions

[GFFG]

Hi.

I have 2 full enterprise Vmware Server farms each with 2 ESX hosts. I am looking to upgrade each farm to Update 5 so they will be better prepared for Vsphere upgrade in a month or so.

Info : esx server summary - build 199239 ( latest updates applied via UM) Across all farms this is the latest build

My questions are:

1 - Given that Update Manager(UM) scans no more required patches can I proceed with upgrading the VCenter using the ISO as I have in the past?

2 - There is no reason to burn any CD's and cold boot an ESX server to raise it's level to UPDATE 5, correct? Update manager handles this right? ( since my upgrade is minor not MAJOR ? ) correct?

3 - Do I have to push new vmware tools?

I've checked all my previous notes when I went from U2-U3 and then U3-U4 and all I've ever ran is the " VMware-VIMSetup-2.5.0-U5-English.iso or VMware-VIMSetup-2.5.0-U5-English.zip "

That's it. I run on NFS so I don't need to worry about either farm needing a datastore upgrade. All my ESX's are up to date so do you guys think my plan is ok to just run the update on my 2 VC'S independantly?

[Troy_Clavell]

only thing I would suggest doing in the future is to upgrade your vCenter Server(s) first. Running older agents on newer hosts could pose some problems. 3.5.0U5 isn't out yet, but I heard sometime late November.

Just make sure you have a good backup of your vCenter DB before you upgrade. However, going from vCenter 2.5.0U4 to U5 there is no schema upgrade.

3.5.0U4 required an update to your guest tools. So, that will have to be done at somepoint as well.