vSphere 5.1 Upgrade Guide?

[sofakng]

Since vSphere 5.1 has been officially released, is there an upgrade guide available?

I'm not looking for anything extremely detailed... I just have a development (stand-alone) ESXi 5.0 host that i'd like to upgrade to 5.1 and I'm not sure the steps I need to follow...

[aravinds3107 · Accepted solution]

All documents related to vSpher 5.1 can be found here

I did the upgrade using ISO earlier in the day and it was pretty simple.

Load the ISO and reboot the host and follow the on screen menus.

When it prompts for the below select the appropraite and proceed

Upgrade ESXi, preserve VMFS datastore
Install ESXi, preserve VMFS datastore
Install ESXi, overwrite VMFS datastore

[sofakng]

Thanks!!  How did I miss that?

What's the difference between preserving or overwriting the VMFS datastore?  (i.e. what is the VMFS datastore?)

I've installed ESXi 5.0 onto a USB stick and have a few datastores:

3x local HDDs (SATA)

1x NFS (located on a VM -inside- this ESXi host;  i.e. this is an "all-in-one" ZFS/NFS + ESXi server)

I'd like to install ESXi as cleanly as possible (i.e. non-upgrade, but rather a full install) but definitely don't want to lose my virtual machines.

[schepp]

sofakng wrote:

Thanks!!  How did I miss that?

What's the difference between preserving or overwriting the VMFS datastore?  (i.e. what is the VMFS datastore?)

VMFS datastores are the local datastores where your VMs are stored. So you want to preserve them if you don't want to loose your VMs.

Regards

[aravinds3107]

What is VMFS datastore

Its a storage page used for storing VM disk and files

preserving or overwriting the VMFS datastore

Preserving - data present in the datastore would be preserved during the upgrade

Overwrite - data would be overwritten and its simliar to fresh installtion. data present on the local datastore would be deleted

[sofakng]

Thanks!