Upgrading to vcenter 4.1 from 4.0....

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

Soldato
Joined
7 Jun 2003
Posts
16,131
Location
Gloucestershire
First of all, how do i do this? Stupid question i know, i've updated a few hosts from 4.0 to 4.1 but in 2 years of working with vmware i've never had to update vcenter myself. I can find various guides for doing the upgrade for individual hosts but never the vcenter server.

Second question, i can't add 4.1 hosts to vcenter 4.0, but does vcenter 4.1 allow adding of 4.0 hosts? (as i can't upgrade all of them yet due to planned downtime being needed)

Third question, do the vm hosts connected to vcenter need to be turned off or put into maintenance mode when vcenter is being upgraded?

I think that's all the questions i need answered for now, that should be enough for me to get the upgrades done. Thanks for any help on this :)
 
vCenter 4.1 can add 4.0 hosts.

No you don't need to turn off the hosts or put them into maintenance mode though everyone connected to vCenter will be obviously disconnected.

In the past I've always done vCenter first then added the host upgrade to update manager, put one of the hosts into maintenance mode and gone that way. If your hosts are ESX hosts (as oppossed to ESXi hosts) then you should take this opportunity to move them over as there will be no further upgrades to ESX after 4.1.



M.
 
Well I can answer most of those as we have done a similar sort of thing.

1) To upgrade you will need to get the 4.1 installer from the VMWare website, and then just run it on your vCentre, though take a SQL backup first.

2) You can add 4.0 hosts to a 4.1 vCentre, our blades are stuck on 4.0u1 due to a driver issue and function fine within vCentre.

3) No you do not need to do anything with the hosts or VM's. You can just do the upgrade of the vCentre.

In case you are not aware if you turn off your vCentre the hosts will continue to run, the VMs will continue to run and everything will be ok, however you will lose features like DRS, HA, FT as they are tasks that the vCentre controls.

Hope this helps

Kimbie
 
Thank you very much guys, that's exactly the information i was after. I'm aware that turning off vcentre means everything else runs fine, just didn't know if the upgrade would mean vcenter automatically doing anything to the connected hosts which worried me.

I'll have a go at this today then, cheers :)
 
Yeah, VMcentre is a pain, 4.0 was 32bit only and 4.1 is 64 bit only, not really an upgrade option..
 
Ah I forgot about that, we were lucky as we could re-allocated a new DL380 for the job.

Read "reallocated" for virtualizing the server that was on that hardware :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom