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DonDon11
Contributor
Contributor

Upgrade ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5

I have recently taken over as the system admin at a new company and I'm looking at upgrading their ESX hosts from ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5. The ESX host are compatible for ESXi 5 as well as the storage but I want to know if their are any known issues to look out for and how easy is it to upgrade the host.

I have currently 3 host all running HA, would this also need to be re-configured once the upgrade has taken place? I have an above average knowledge on VMware but have not done any vm upgrades before. Any help would be ace!

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iw123
Commander
Commander

Hi,

Have a look at this post, it should help fill in some of the blanks.

http://thesaffageek.co.uk/2011/10/07/upgrading-from-vsphere-4-1-to-vsphere-5-2/

Thanks

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MauroBonder
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

You can perform the upgrade as the guide below, if you have vms internal disk, move to storage.
If you use the virtual center, you must first vcenter upgrade to version 5.
If the load of CPU and memory has plenty of hosts, you can migrate the entire load of a host and update it with this you will not have any downtime vm

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-upgrade...

Discussion moved from VMware ESX™ 4 to vSphere Upgrade & Install

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DonDon11
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, I have a 2 week shut down soon which gives plenty of time to do the upgrades with out effecting the busines but will look at Migrating the vm's before hand and then moving them back once the upgrade has been completed.

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