What is the best way to update the hosts in this cluster

[pwjohnston]

So I have a vSphere cluster in our production environment that I need to upgrade and I have been reading the docs.  I’m hoping I can bounce some ideas off you guys.

We have one IBM bladecenter with 4 blades and a 10 Gb SAN for our shared storage.  As for as software we have a Windows 2k8R2 running vCenter with the SQL Express db.  We also have ESXi 5.0 on our hosts.  We also have no internet to these servers, they are on a separate cut off subnet.  I think I have the the vCenter upgrade worked out, I’m just not sure if there is anything I need to do to the SQL Express db using the simple install.  My big question is on the hosts.

The hosts are HS22V IBM blades with no hard disk, we’re booting off the internal USB so clearly I’m going to have to make sure there is enough space on /boot.  The upgrade doc said 350 mb.    The other thing the doc said that bothers me this:

“If a SAN is connected to the host, detach the fibre before continuing with the upgrade or migration. Do not disable HBA cards in the BIOS.”

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.upgrade.doc_50%2FGUID-712F3F...

Now this doesn’t make sense to me.  How do people do in place upgrades on their cluster, because that’s production I can’t bring that down.  My blades don’t connect to the SAN directly the Bladecenter chassis does.

Should I be doing an interactive upgrade as recommended?  Wouldn’t I need an outside connection for that? Or maybe I should be doing an interactive upgrade since it so few hosts?  Or maybe I can remove each host, do a fresh install, and read to the cluster?

What would you guys recommend?

[BDwyer1]

You can actually do an "online" upgrade via SSH if you want to using host profiles.

     1. Enable HTTP Client Firewall Exception

          esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

     2. List Profiles

          esxcli software sources profile list -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

    3. Choose and install profile

          esxcli software profile install -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml -p ESXi-5.1.0-799733-standard

• Might need option --ok-to-remove
  
  

[chriswahl]

The other thing the doc said that bothers me this:

“If a SAN is connected to the host, detach the fibre before continuing with the upgrade or migration. Do not disable HBA cards in the BIOS.”

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.upgrade.doc_50%2FGUID-712F3F...

Now this doesn’t make sense to me.  How do people do in place upgrades on their cluster, because that’s production I can’t bring that down.  My blades don’t connect to the SAN directly the Bladecenter chassis does.

This is more focused on an upgrade (installing from a previous version) as opposed to an update / patching (as stated in your post title). The risk is around a user or script accidently choosing the wrong LUN to install ESXi on and destroying production data. Typically a script chooses the first LUN it sees, so it is generally a good idea to mask off the other LUNs so that the host only has one choice. If you are just doing an update or patching, such as via Update Manager, there is typically no need to do this.

Note: In a blade environment, "detach the fibre" typically translates into putting a blade into maintenance mode and properly removing access to the production LUNs during an upgrade (unmount, mask, upgrade, remove mask, re-mount). As obviously you can't pull a cable

[pwjohnston]

BDwyer1

Thank you for your suggestion, but I neglected to mention that we're currently using Standard edition.  We do have a quote out for Enterprise Plus, but I don't know when that will be available.  So I can't do the host profiles just yet.

[pwjohnston]

Thanks for the tips chriswahl, that makes me feel better about the SAN issue.  I haven't worked with many blades, this is actually my first so this makes sense. Thank you.

[pwjohnston]

It looks like this is going to work for me assuming not much has changed really from 5.0 to 5.1.

Upgrading to ESXi 5.0 using Update Manager 5.0

http://www.youtube.com/user/VMwareKB?feature=watch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds7fvpGT1Sg