Can anyone provide me with a quick overview of the upgrade process and any gotchas I might run into when upgrading with this config?
I'm thinking I'm going to lose the resource pools and will probably replace those with similarly named folders after the upgrade so I took screenshots of the inventory in prep for this. But from a high-level my plan is as follows:
Pause the running VMs.
Place the host into maint mode.
Shutdown the host.
Pull the flash drive and make a copy of the flash drive's current state just in case things go wrong. I have an identical stick set aside for this purpose.
Reinstall the flash drive.
Boot to ESXi 5.1 CD.
And here's where things start to get fuzzy for me...
Upgrade the existing installation on the flash drive. Can I do this with a host that has this much memory installed?
Assuming I can, at this point I'm expecting to be on ESXi5.1 with only 32GB of usable RAM.
Can I then just install the vSphere 5 Enterprise license for 2 CPUs on this host to reclaim all 148GB of RAM?
Any suggestions or clarifications are appreciated.
I assume you already checked the hardware compatibility for the host and storage!?
Some comments:
André
For compatibility looks like the SAN had 4.1 support but I don't see it for 5.1. It's more of a test-dev system anyway so I'm not necessarily concerned with full support in this case, I mainly want to get it to 5.1 without losing the memory. Will shutdown the VMs instead of pausing.
Thanks.
