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GFFG
Contributor
Contributor

Vsphere 4.0 U1 upgrade questions (2 ESX 3.5 U4 in a cluster)

Hi guys,

I will be upgrading my esx farm http://3.5u4 to Vpshere 4.0 Upgrade 1 next week. There is some concern that upgrading my esx servers might cause me an issue. Even though they have passed the upgrade check I may have space issues when it comes time to use UPDATE MANAGER TO UPDATE THEM.

What I'm asking is the following:

If I upgrade the Vcenter + the Database and all the other pre-upgrade tasks and I come to the ESX upgrade and it says "no go can't upgrade it , not enough space" can I still run my environment until I can setup a new ESX that has SPACE ~10gb free?

Assuming I can't upgrade will I still have to upgrade Vmtools and VM Hardware level's too?

Nothing fancy about my setup. Shared NFS storage Datastore, two esx's in a cluster with Enterprise licenced HA/DRS enabled.

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Yes you can - vCenter 4.0 allows you to manage ESX 3.5 hosts with out the loss of any functionality - the only thing you will have to install seperately is a VI-3 license server on your vcenter host -

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GFFG
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks so much for your reply. During the upgrade does my existing license server get uninstalled? Would I have to then re-install it for some reason? I have my license server installed on my Vcenter, same box.

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

yes the license server is uninstalled during the upgrade as I recall - have you checked the upgrade guide - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40_u1/vsp_40_u1_upgrade_guide.pdf

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chriswaltham
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I would upgrade them to 4.0.0; hold off on going to 4.0U1 while some of the bugs are being worked out. I have a few tickets open with VMware on issues that I think are too severe for a production release (kernel panic when mounting a CD-ROM in a VM, for instance.) 4.0.0 has worked great for me, just not 4.0U1.

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GFFG
Contributor
Contributor

Wow! Really? That's huge! On what hardware does that occur? I always figured 4.1 fixed the 4.0 which is the first release at the new software revision level!

Regards, Kyle

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chriswaltham
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Kyle: This is on a HP BL25p Blade server. The VM OS is RHEL 3 (64-bit). The error is very repeatable, it does it every time! I normally go to the update releases quite quickly for the reasons you suggest, but on this one I'm glad I only upgraded our test cluster from 4.0.0 to 4.0U1.

Oh, I also ran into the HP Insight bug before they announced it on the support site, and had to manually rebuild an ESX host afterward...

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GFFG
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for sharing, I have hs21 blades and run windows 2000/2003/2008 servers. So nothing special. It sounds as if I'd have to re-install the license server and should have my ESX 3.5 U4 CD ready so I could re-install the License server should the ESX not have enough space on them. They pass the pre-check so it "should be ok".

Regards, Kyle

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GFFG
Contributor
Contributor

After reading the upgrade pdf the answer is NO. the license server will NOT BE un-installed during upgrade.

Here is the quote :

Uninstalling the VMware License Server

After you upgrade all of your hosts to ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0, you can optionally uninstall your license server and

remove the license server configuration from vCenter Server.

NOTE Consider leaving the license server and the license server configuration in place if the vCenter Server

instance might need to manage ESX 3.x/ESXi 3.5 hosts in the future. The license server does not interfere with

operations if you leave it in place.

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