VMWare Upgrade ESX 3.0.0 to ESX 3.0.1

Finally decided to upgrade my VMWare ESX Servers from the original ESX 3.0.0 that I installed back in August to VMWare ESX 3.0.1. Since I have (2) ESX machines running I moved all my production boxes over to server#2 and turned off my test boxes. This gave 8 production systems running on Server#2, but it barley noticed them. I then put Server#1 in maintenance mode and decided to use the .tar upgrade file rather than the CD. Checksum was correct so I went ahead and took a quick backup of a few key directories "/etc" and "/vmware" and then ran the esxupdate command to kick off the upgrade.

Uh oh, failed on VM-Kernal file not matching. After finding other users on the VMTN Discussion Forums with the same problem...but no solutions...I decided to download the ISO file and try an upgrade from CD. Went through the CD Upgrade and about half way through it failed to read the VM-Kernel file from the CD. Seriously? The CD Media checked out fine! So I burned a new CD (at 8x speed just in case) checked it again and started the upgrade process...same thing. Wow, this is lame. So I decided I might as well just do a clean install as I'm sure my system is hosed by now anyway.

Clean install worked fine off the CD Media but now I had to re-setup all my LUN Paths, Networks, DNS, IP's, etc. No biggie, its not too hard and I have Server#2 to look at as a reference. After deleting the new old Server#1 from Virtual Infrastructure and re-adding the new Server#1 I find that I can't light up VMotion and all my test boxes have been (orphaned).
Ok, I'm starting to get worried as I can't really upgrade Server#2 if I can't move my 8 production VM's over to Server#1 and I'm not really sure I want to after this smooth upgrade I've just had.

Time to call VMWare Tech Support. I have the gold support, which means I call them... they take my info and call me back the next day. Not ideal...but at least my production VM's were still running. After a couple days of phone tag with VMWare support I finally get to talk to somebody and he quickly shows me a command to fix my orphaned test VMs ( vmware-cmd -s register /vpx/vms/_/ ). Nice, all my test VM's are back to normal status. Now on to why VMotion wouldn't work. I missed a key step when setting up my Network again, that little check box next to Enable VMotion in the network config. Wow, that was easy. Re-configure for HA and were ready to roll.

Upgrade for Server#2 planned for next week...I hope the upgrade goes much smoother.