Upgrading from ESX 4.0

[tmillcon]

Thanks in advance for any advice.  I’m the IT Manager at a school district and I am preparing to upgrade to Vmware 5.1.  I currently have three ESX 4.0 servers and one Vcenter 32bit server on a physical box.  Since I have to migrate to a 64bit platform for Vcenter, and from ESX to ESXI, I was thinking a clean install would be the best approach but I’m not sure which would be the most efficient way.  I’m just throwing this out there to see if it’s doable:

1. Create a VM for the new Vcenter server on one of the 4.0 hosts.
   
   
2. Install Vcenter 5.0 and migrate settings from the 4.0 Vcenter
   
   
3. Remove the three hosts from the 4.0 cluster and add them to a new cluster on Vcenter 5
   
   
4. Upgrade or clean install each host to 5.0 (I can vmotion all of my VM’s to the other two boxes and still keep everything up)
   
   
5. Upgrade everything to 5.1
   
   

I’m open to any suggestions.  Also, how does the upgrade affect the data stores? Do the Volumes need to be updated to VMFS 5.

Thanks again for any help.

[aravinds3107 · Accepted solution]

My Suggestion would be as below

1) Create a new 64 bit VM for vCenter and migrate the database

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=585044...
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=200532...

2) Migrate the VM's off the host and do a fresh install of the host to ESXi 5.1
3) I would suggest to move the VM's to differrent datastore and create a new VMFS5 datastore rather than upgrading as you can get the full benefits of VMFS5 version
4) Upgrade the VMware tools and Virutal hardware version 9

Also make sure to read the upgrade guide

and check Interoperability Matrix

[tmillcon]

Thanks for the advice.  Should I remove the host from the cluster before doing the fresh install of  ESXi 5.1?