VMWare Update Manager - ESX Host upgrade

I recently finished using the VMWare Update Manager to update my ESX Host systems. The process seems to work well but I did run into a few glitches. The first thing I noticed is that if it takes to long to migrate your VM's from the ESX Host you are updating to one of your other hosts the remediate process will time out. (The task can not be canceled and it ends up just hanging at that point). It would be nice if you had more information on what's going on with the task and cancellation points. The first time I ran the update I hit the task hang mentioned above. At this point I really only had two options restart the update manager service or restart the Virtual Center server. I first tried restarting the update manager service. In my case this did not work so I ended up restarting the Virtual Center server. After the reboot the tasks were showing as failed and no longer in progress.

So I decided to manually migrate all my VM's off the host before starting the process. On my first system I also manually put the host in maintenance mode. It took about 25 minutes to complete the process on each of my ESX hosts. One thing that was odd is that my versions didn't seem to change after the update process even though it showed 12 updates installed that were released on 3/12... VC still shows VMWare ESX Server 3.5.0, 64607. (this is what I showed before the updates.)

Overall this is still much easier then having to manually download each of the updates and run them from the console.

VMWare ESX 3.0.2 upgrade to VMWare ESX 3.5

I recently upgraded VMWare ESX 3.0.2 to the newest version ESX 3.5. I always upgrade using the full CD ISO downloaded from the VMWare support site. I had problems in the past using the .tar versions. The upgrade went very smoothly and took about 20-25 minutes with minor testing.

Here's my process:

1. Move all VM's onto 2nd ESX Host
2. PUT ESX Host into Maintenance mode
3. Reboot ESX Host with Image CD in it (Ghost)
4. Get a Image of the system
   
5. Reboot ESX Host with upgrade / install CD in it
6. Go through the upgrade using the default options (if doing upgrade the defaults are what you set when you did the inital install)
7. Reboot ESX Host
8. I then check a couple files to make sure my custom changes didn't get overwritten. 2 of my changes are: take out the hda= link int he grub.conf to fix my CD/DVD Drive and I enable ssh for my management system.
9. Via Virtual Center bring the newly upgraded ESX host out of maintenence mode.
10. start up a test VM on the new ESX Host and run some tests / network tests on it.
11. migrate a second running test VM from the production ESX Host to the newly upgraded ESX Host... again perform tests / network tests to verify it's running ok.
12. slowly migrate production VM's over.

The new ESX 3.5 has some greate features. there is a new update manager that allows you to update the OS of you Virtual Machines and does more than just a simple windows update as it will update things like firefox, MS XML stuff, windows updates, java, etc. I was blown away at how many updates were availible. You can sepcifiy which type of updates you wand and wether you want to skip certian updates (like the IE7 update). It also allows you to upgrade multiple VM's at one time. Wow, I can see the possible time savings already.

Another really cool part to this is the ability to upgrade your ESX Hosts directly from Virtual Center and apply patches.

Way to go VMWare.

Upgrade VMware ESX 3.0.1 to ESX 3.0.2

Pretty easy & smooth process to upgrade from VMware Infrastructure ESX 3.0.1 to VMware ESX 3.0.2. Since I'm running my systems off a SAN and using VMWare vmotion all I needed to do was put my first ESX server in maintenance mode and shut it down. This automatically moved all my running VM's via vmotion over to the other ESX server. I then put in the 3.0.2 install / upgrade CD and booted from it. CD Upgrade went pretty quickly, approx 10 minutes and then rebooted the system. After reboot my Virtual Center picked the system with no problems and I turned on a test machine to make sure it was working ok. I then moved over a couple production VM's without problems.

Since the upgrade appeared to work just fine I repeated the process on my second ESX server.