VCenter 3.5 to vCenter 4

[markuk]

Hi,

I am looking to install vCenter 4 on to our vCenter 3.5 has any one had any issues doing this?

Once I have installed vCenter 4 it will be managing 3.5 and Vshpere hosts , has any on come across any problems with this also?

Thanks

Mark

[paul_xtravirt · Accepted solution]

Hi Mark,

I have done this a few times now, and as long as you follow the upgrade guide you will be fine.

The guide is located at the following link: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_upgrade_guide.pdf

As for your question regarding managing a mixture of ESX host versions, considerations will be installing a license server to ensure that your ESX35 hosts remain licensed (ESX4 uses license codes, the license server itself is deprecated). I would also keep your ESX35 and ESX4 hosts in seperate clusters.

Out of curiosity, any reason that you are not upgrading the ESX35 hosts to vSphere?

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[AndreTheGiant]

The vCenter Server 4 can manage both ESX 3.x and 4.x without problems.

As written before be only sure to install the license server for ESX 3.x hosts.

Andre

[depping]

Have done multiple upgrades, so far no issues at all. Take a look at the upgrade guide, follow it step by step.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX

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[markuk]

Thanks for the replies,

paul_xtravirt - I am looking to upgrade the ESX 3.5 servers, but 2 of the servers are testing boxes and owned by another team. Although my department manage and look after the host they have the final say on what we do with the servers and might not allow use to upgrade the servers.

Thanks again

[markstoltzfus]

We did this twice in our environment (once in pre-prod, once in prod, both from Virtual Center 2.5U3 to 4.0U1). This is what we ran into:

1) On the two upgrades I've done, every 3.5 host had to have vmotion disabled/enabled to get vmotion working, vmware said they're aware of this.

2) If you use a domain account to connect to update manager, you'll need to update the service by hand, since the upgrade changes this to local system, another one vmware is aware of.

3) In the Virtual Center Performance tab, the overview graph doesn't display, you'll need to update c:\program files\vmware\infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\statsreport\meta-inf\context.xml (or wherever you installed it) to make sure the database connectivity information is correct. Look for Container, then sqlserver. In both upgrades we did, this was filled in with some bogus default value. Again, vmware is aware of this.

The first upgrade we did went ok (other than the above-mentioned glitches). The second upgrade we did was a nightmare. vCenter wouldn't stay up for more than a few hours. Opened a P1 case with VMware support who wrestled with it for five days before we threw our hands up and did a complete system wipe and started over with a new database. Since we didn't have too much complexity built in to our configuration (default roles, no resource pools, etc.) it wasn't too painful after that, we just reconnected our hosts, recreated our folder structure, re-created permissions, and recreated our templates. We did lose all of our performance data, but after five days of instability, it was worth it.