Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

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.