Dell Poweredge 1900 and upgrading to ESXi 4

[KEPete]

I have a PE1900 running ESXi 3.5U4 installable and have attempted to upgrade without success. I was wondering if anyone else out there has this server and have successfully completed an upgrade on it. I originally bought this for a home lab and did not want to bother setting up a white box, figuring this was a known working server for 3.5. The specs I have are single Xeon quad-core 1.6gh, 2 Intel dual port Gig and built in Broadcom Gig Nic, built-in SATA controller with 4 SATA hdd for host OS and datastores. I also have a Openfiler box for additional iSCSI datastores. My attempt was to use the host update utility to update it using the zip file according to the directions found on vm-help.com and the only error I received was that the host was not supported. I know the PE1900 is not on the HCL but the PE1950 is and am not sure what the major difference between the two are. I've been trolling the forums and Googling for info but have not come up with anything in regards to vSphere. Any input or advice would be appreciated. BTW, I have not tried installing off of the iso due to the fact that a co-worker attempted it and told me it wiped his datastores even though he used the upgrade option on the cd boot. I know this is a home lab, but I do keep a lot of data on it as well that is backed up but can be a pain to restore due to size and amount so I'm hesitant to try this route. I'm still a n00b in the vmware world and am trying to learn. Thanks.

[KEPete]

Well, just wanted to report that 3rd time was the charm on a standing

upgrade to my ESXi 3.5 U4 host to the new ESXi 4. Just a brief

synopsis: 1st attempt failed with only an error stating that the host

was not compatible. 2nd attempt got further but gave a error saying

that it failed and to check the logs via VI Client.When looking at the

console screen, it showed version 4 and after checking the

configuration pages, found that the gateway was set wrong. Weird.

Anyway, reconfigured and rebooted. Everything came up and connected ok.

I ran the Host update utility again it stated that the VMTools package

and other software did not update and to run update again. So ran the

update for the 3rd time and it completed without problems. Took it out

of maintenance mode and am now proceeding to update the vmtools on my

guests and then the hardware update.

[onsik]

The main difference between PE1950 and PE1900 is that PE1950 is rack mounted, Pe1900 is a box, but with an option that could be rack mounted.

The componnets on those servers are the same, make sure that you have the latest BIOS 2.5.0, BMC (Baseboard Managment Controller) fiirmware 2.37 and the latest firmware for PERC 5i or PERC6i RAID controller, there are max 2 x CPU, 2 embedded Broadcom NICs

Good luck

Onsik

[KEPete]

Thanks onsik. Yeah, I looked up the 1950 and couldn't find much difference other than the rackmount. I was just thrown off because the host update utility was giving me problems initially and I thought it was because of the HCL. I did manage to finally complete the upgrade process and all is up and stable. I will look at my bios and firmware version though. Thanks for the heads up.