Remote in-place upgrade from ESX3.5 to vSphere
April 22, 2009
I have an ESX 3.5 host running on an ML-110g4 that I want to upgrade to the beta of vSphere.
The vSphere client seems to come with a remote update utility as shown below.
It will download the upgrade packages over the network and then upgrade the OS remotely, nice no iLo or trip to the DC required… hopefully! {this was done with beta code remember}
Point it at ESX4 DVD .iso file
Validating the .iso file 
Accepting the EULA
Supply the appropriate credentials for the ESX host
Host needs to be in maintenance mode, as you might expect 
with the host in maintenance mode it can continue
You need to choose a location to store the virtual disk file for the COS
Enter failure options, what to do if it doesn’t work!
Summary screen and we’re ready to go..
On its way
unfortunately this eventually timed out
Upon investigating my ESX 3.5 host was shutting down and got stuck for some reason, manual reboot saw the upgrade process proceeding on the console, this was done with the RC beta build so this could be a bug..
about 30mins later it was all complete and my ESX 3.5 host was upgraded to vSphere.
Very useful feature
I wrote this post last month but hopefully now the covers are off vSphere I can post more of this without falling foul of the NDA that covered the beta programme.
good stuff, added it to my link list!
[...] – Remote in-place upgrade from ESX 3.5 to vSphere « Oracle to buy Sun “vSphere” Screensaver » addthis_pub = [...]
Here’s a video that shows these steps.
http://vmwire.blogspot.com/2009/05/upgrading-to-vmware-vsphere-using.html
[...] VMware vSphere Licensing How to Upgrade from VMware Infrastructure 3 to VMware vSphere 4 (May 27th) Remote in-place upgrade from ESX3.5 to vSphere Author: esiebert7625 Categories: vSphere Links Tags: Upgrade Comments are closed. [...]
Very nice write up. Just one thing, When I select my 3.5 host in the updater, it tells me that upgrading from that version is not supported.