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Upgrading to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 |
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008
by Michel Roth
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After his detailed guides on VMware ESX Server 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 and ESX 3i, Mike Laverick has publihed an additional document with his experiences in upgrading to VMware ESX Server 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5.
The guide covers Mike's experiences of upgrading from VirtualCenter 2.0.2 to 2.5 – and various methods of upgrading from ESX 3.0.2 to ESX 3.5. Mike has noticed some "flicks" put generally is pleases with the upgrade proces: "Generally, the upgrade process is OK. But I’m still
irritated by some of inexplicable database upgrade error messages I’ve had in
VirtualCenter. What’s really annoying about them is you have no idea that you
will have them until the very end of the upgrade process. Once the Upgrade
Database wizard has malfunctioned it does try to “rollback” your database to
good state – but your VirtualCenter installation is usually poached – and you
in re-install to an existing database territory. For that reason I would urge
people to backup and snapshot their SQL and VirtualCenter installation. I’m
also somewhat irritated by plug-ins. Sometimes
they appear and other times you don’t. You have install them AND enable them
for every Vi Client instance you have. Whilst I appreciate that plugins offer
third parties to opportunity to extend the functionality of the Vi Client –personally
I would be happier if these things were just included in the Vi Client and
enabled by a license.
The ESX upgrade part is relatively easy – given that the
upgrade process can modify your configuration (as in my SSH example) and that
moving a VM off an ESX host is simple. I think I would still prefer to wipe my
ESX hosts and do a clean install – adding them back into VirtualCenter. This is
not without consequences. It means loosing some of that precious performance
data collected over a number of weeks or months."
Check Mike's 18-page experiences.
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