ESXi 4.1 U1 upgrade to U2 with vCenter 5.0

[Andrews13]

Hallo all,

can I use vCenter 5.0 Update Manager for updating my 4.1 esxi hosts? we bought licence for vCenter just now, so we installed most recent version, but we do not want to update host to 5.0, we will wait some time, its production environment, we will rather stay on 4.1 U2.

When I install Update Manager from vCenter 5.0 installation media, it says me, that Update Manager can be only used to patch 4.1 to 5.0, is that right?

thanks for all answers

Regards

Andrews

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - What I would recommend is to downgrade the vCenter license to 4.1 and install vCenter 4.1 - when you are ready to upgrade 5 then upgrade the entire environment -  In regards to question I believe you would be able to use VUM 5 to patch the existing environment but you will have to select the approriate patches but I am not 100% sure -

[Andrews13]

Thanks, we have already installed vCenter 5.0 on newly installed VM with Windows Server 2008 R2 only for this purpose. What do you think, has it sense to uninstall vCenter (with Update Manger), restart and then install vCenter 4.1 in order to have all environment on 4.1 ? then I would simply upgrade to vCenter 5.0 on same machine. Problem is, if its possible to safely uninstall vCenter 5.0 and then install 4.1 it on same machine without problems ? we have really small environment (two hosts so far, later will be more), so database is empty (as I said, only installed vCenter 5.0 and added two hosts to inventory with appropriate licences), thanks.

[a_p_]

When I install Update Manager from vCenter 5.0 installation media, it  says me, that Update Manager can be only used to patch 4.1 to 5.0, is  that right?

I think this statement only applies to host upgrades, where you can only upgrade from 4.x to 5.0.

According to the documentation (pdf) you can use Update Manager 5.0 to apply patched to ESXi 4.x as well as 5.0 hosts.

André

[Andrews13]

Thanks for answers, I have tried to update it with vCenter 5.0 by means of downloading .zip file from VMware pages and it worked perfectly by update manager of vCenter 5.0.

I have one more questions, because I am really new to update manager. When I attach critical and non-critical patch baseline to my ESXi 4.1 build 502767, and run remmediaton, I do not see any patches will be applied to my host, but when I do it on my ESXi 4.0 build 392990, I see lot of this patches will be applied. Does it mean, that ESXi 4.1 build 502767 can not be patched more, because is the most recent version?

Also, can I upgrade my ESXi 4.0 build 392990 to recent version of 4.1 without encounter some major issues to function of host? there are few virtual machines on that, because I heard, that upgrading from 4.1 to 5.0 must be done really carefully and with backing up all VMs on hosts.

thanks for all

[a_p_]

Does it mean, that ESXi 4.1 build 502767 can not be patched more, because is the most recent version?

Makes sense, doesn't it

Also, can I upgrade my ESXi 4.0 build 392990 to recent version of 4.1 without encounter some major issues to function of host?

I didn't try this myself yet. However, I think with creating the appropriate Host Upgrade Baseline this should work.

... because I heard, that upgrading from 4.1 to 5.0 must be done really carefully and with backing up all VMs ...

It's always good to have up to date backups! There's always a chance that something can go wrong. However, if you make sure you meet the prerequisites (e.g. all your hardware is on the HCL) the upgrade should work. Remember, you cannot upgrade a host to ESXi 5.0 if it has previously been upgraded from version 3.x!

André