Upgrading vcenter, several questions

bateslabel · ‎12-07-2010

Hi I am in the process of planning to upgrade our vmware infrastructure to 4.1. I am upgrading Vcenter first obviously. We are presently at Vcenter 4.0 build 258672. We have it installed on 2005 sql express sp2. My first question is, I want to install sql express 2008 R2, which has an upgrade for sql express 2005. I figure I would shutdown vcenter services and just run the upgrade. Will this automatically upgrade the database and will vcenetr connect automatically to the upgraded database? Is there anything I need to do special? Then from there I am going to update Vcenter to 4.1, then upgrade our 3 hosts. Should I upgrade vcenter to 4.1 first then update the sql express to upgrade the database? I have do the check for inconsistent machines and made a backup of the database. If there is a doc that answers these questions for me, I would appreciate being pointed to it. I did a seach, but didn't really come up with anything. I am trying to bring vmware up to date. The folks before me have been very lax.

logiboy123 · ‎12-07-2010

First question; Is vCenter currently a VM on the inside of the environment? This will affect your migration method.

Second question; Why would you want to move to SQL 2008 Express? I don't think this is supported. In the compatibility matrix it doesn't even list SQL 2008 Express.

Third question; Do you currently have vCenter installed on a 32bit platform and if so do you want to upgrade to 64bit?

Updates to the vCenter database are done by the vCenter installation program, not SQL. They will form part of the upgrade process, namely when performing the upgrade the installation will warn you that it is going to do an upgrade and will require you to tick a box that says Yes I have taken a backup of my SSL directory and database. I would strongly advise doing just that before begining the upgrade process.

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Upgrading vcenter, several questions