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iLikeMoney
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Upgrade Free ESXi 4.1 to vSphere 5.1

Can anyone provide me with a quick overview of the upgrade process and any gotchas I might run into when upgrading with this config?

  • The box is a Dell Poweredge T710 with 148GB RAM with two physical CPUs.
  • ESXi 4.1 is installed on a 2GB flash drive plugged into the motherboard.
  • Other storage is as follows:
  • Six Cheetah SAS drives on a RAID10 internal, those are plugged into an Adaptec 5805 card.
  • A Nexsan Sataboy SAN plugged into the server directly with fiber.
  • This server started out with just the local storage and then the SAN was added later, so there are VMs spread across both arrays.
  • There are also 18 user named resource pools that are being used for organizational purposes as opposed to anything 'resource' related.

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.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

I assume you already checked the hardware compatibility for the host and storage!?

Some comments:

  • don't pause the VMs, but cleanly shut them down!
  • any license other than the free one will do, even Essentials will allow you to use all of the installed memory

André

iLikeMoney
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

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.

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