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ufo8mydog
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ESX3.5 => 4: Patch upgrade or clean install

Hi guys (and gals)

What are your thoughts on the upgrade process - should we be patching esx 3.5 to 4.0 via update manager, or does 'best practices' dictate that a clean install would be a better approach? I'm leaning towards the latter, as it seems to be rather a large upgrade - but, if anyone has already tried both scenarios in their lab environment then that input would be most welcome.

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hicksj
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Our standard is "no major release upgrades." In other words, we'll never apply upgrades over the top of the previous generation product.

Looking ahead to vCenter 4 with "Host Profiles" - throwing a clean host on the network and then pushing all our configuration settings out seems quite ideal. Even without the profile enforcement, our baseline config today is quite simple - especially with ESXi.... so adding automation really doesn't save much time. Ensuring consistency is would be nice however.

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hicksj
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Our standard is "no major release upgrades." In other words, we'll never apply upgrades over the top of the previous generation product.

Looking ahead to vCenter 4 with "Host Profiles" - throwing a clean host on the network and then pushing all our configuration settings out seems quite ideal. Even without the profile enforcement, our baseline config today is quite simple - especially with ESXi.... so adding automation really doesn't save much time. Ensuring consistency is would be nice however.

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Rockapot
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Personally i would do a clean build on v4. Additionally I usually recomend my clients wait between 2 - 4 months after a product release to let the main issues smooth out through customer feedback.

If clients have a larger VMware Engineer support base and are a bit more daring then we would do an upgrade(via clean install) sooner.

Carl

Troy_Clavell
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I agree a rebuild is the best way to go, and as already mentioned host profiling makes it that much easier. This may change in GA, but the only upgrade option available in RC for ESX(i) 4 was using VUM. The install media only allows for clean installs.

hicksj
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Troy, that's a good point regarding ESXi. For the most part, ESXi updates are like a "firmware" upgrade, thus, using VUM in a 3.5 -> 4 scenario might be preferred.

With ESX and it's service console, things change over time and original partition structures don't carry forward very well. That is one reason its nice to start fresh on ESX.

Likewise, Carl makes an excellent point as well about taking time to jump platforms. While I probably won't update until Update 1, everyone else is encouraged to go forward so they find the problems before I do! (to those folks - thanks for keeping my environment stable!) Smiley Happy

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ufo8mydog
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These are all excellent points.

I take it that since vCenter is just a normal Windows program that it is pretty safe to upgrade over the top of it?

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Troy_Clavell
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yes, you can just upgrade.

please consider awarding points by marking answers as "correct" or "helpful"

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admin
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vSphere upgrade videos cover transition from VI3 and previous version

of ESX. Please look under, " How do I upgrade?" from the URL below:

Regardless of how unique your environment is, do verify with the upgrade checklist and backup the data.

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rocker77
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I test upgrade on two ESX 3.5 hosts and it's complete smoothly but in production I'll make clean install. It's more complicated way but IMHO more safer way.

I'm interest in other thing. What will upgrade do with local partitions of ESX 3.5. When I take a look to storage configuration of upgraded ESX 4 I see new datastore in which are 1GB Linux native, 110MB VMware diagnostic and extended (VMFS) partition where reside VMDK of COS.

Update manager delete all previous partitions i.e. /, SWAP, /boot, /tmp, /opt and /var and migrate all data to VMDK file and create new 1GB Linux native nad 110 VMware diagnostic partitions?

Roman.

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admin
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Console OS partitions are not deleted, newer ones are created in the newly created VMDK and configuration is migrated over. If you want you can still boot into the old partition (which means boot into ESX 3.5)!

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AlbertWT
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Yes, that is true, I've tried to upgrade my ESXi 3.5u4 into ESXi 4.0 to no avail Smiley Sad

and then i did clean reinstall and it worked flawlessly until today and one more thing to add is that if you have iSCSI SAN, you then need to remap the iSCSI SAN connection (delete and crete new one in your SAN mgmt. Software.)

HTH.

Kind Regards,

AWT

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admin
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It would be interesting to find out what the problem is with migrating from 3.5 u4 -> esx4.0.

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