Upgrading ESXi

[WeFixIT.ie]

Hello,

I am looking after two ESXi hosts which are running 6.0.0, 2494585 and I need to upgrade them to at least 6.0 U3 which is 5050593. I have never upgraded an ESXi installation and it looks both simple and complicated!

My big fear is to do with drivers (or maybe the lack of drivers). The hosts are a PowerEdge R720 and R610 which both support an upgrade to the version I need. I know I could upgrade further but I'd be happy with baby steps!

Dell have ESXi downloads and I can download from VMware too, does it make sense to use on or the other? Common sense tells me that the Dell download is the one to use but with no experience it's only a guess.

Is there any way to tell whether a Dell or VMware ISO was used in the first place to install ESXi? Does it matter which was used when upgrading?

If things go belly up, does the ESXi rollback option work well? The catch 22 here is that the version of VMware that I have is having trouble making quiesced snapshots and that means that I can't make backups of the VMs. KB articles from VMware indicate that I have a known problem and it's fixed in the later release.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Cheers,

David

 

[Markverhyden]

For what it's worth I've never had a problem doing an upgrade. But that's with a whopping statistical sampling of 2 boxes, both R720's. One production with my email, web, and owncloud servers. The other is a lab, with all kinds of stuff. Never tried to experiment with the roll back. And I'm just using the free version by the way, so significantly less functionality.

 

[fencepost]

It's been a while since I did one, but what we've done with them is simply run ESXi off of a bootable flash drive - it's not installed on the internal drives at all except that most servers these days seem to have an internal USB port just for this kind of thing.

IIRC you might need to go through and re-import the VMs from the datastore folders, but that's painless unless you have a ton of junk clones on there and things aren't named properly.

The other issue is upgrading the VMs themselves, but that's completely separate from the ESXi host.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

It's been a while since I did one, but what we've done with them is simply run ESXi off of a bootable flash drive - it's not installed on the internal drives at all except that most servers these days seem to have an internal USB port just for this kind of thing.

IIRC you might need to go through and re-import the VMs from the datastore folders, but that's painless unless you have a ton of junk clones on there and things aren't named properly.

The other issue is upgrading the VMs themselves, but that's completely separate from the ESXi host.

This is our preferred method as well. I've never had an issue with upgrades, but you can pull the old stick (make sure you know all of the setup info like DNS, IP, other network info as you'll have to re-enter it) then put in a fresh flash drive and install from scratch then import the VM's. Super simple.

We use the Dell media, because the compatibility is supposed to be better. Truth be told I've used the VMware iso's without issue as well.

Really the whole setup is pretty robust and takes quite a bit to cause a catastrophic issue.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I like the internal SD Cards for the VMWare install...but back in the older days when it was on a small local disk or partition or small slice of a LUN from fiber storage...yeah the upgrades always went smooth.

And with it you may find some updated integration services (err..VMWare Tools) to inject into the guests. Do that one after hours as it may require a bounce.

 

[HCHTech]

I assisted with an upgrade from v5 to v6.5 on a Dell R720 and 2 R420s back in November. This was far from a trivial process. Some highlights:

• The upgrade wasn't free, so we had to make sure we had the correct licenses before we started. $800 or so, I think. There were 3 hosts (Main host with a dozen or so VMs, a local host with the backup DC and RapidRecovery VMs, and a remote host for the offsite RapidRecovery VM), and I don't remember if this was the total or the amount per host.
• v5 used the Vsphere client software, and v6 uses a web console, so there was a bit of a learning curve on how some things were handled differently in the web console compared to the old client
• There was a VIB that we had to manually removed from each host in order to complete the upgrade. I can't recall exactly, I probably have some notes somewhere about it - Huawei something? We had to remove it in an SSH session as part of the process.
• The vmtools had to be upgraded on all of the guests, and they all had to be rebooted a few times as I recall
• I think the vsphere server had to be redone, if I recall correctly. I didn't do this bit, but seem to remember time on the schedule for that.

It was a full Saturday doing the local hosts, and I did the remote host on Sunday afternoon the next day. This is my only ESXi install, so I called in another tech that uses primarily ESXi for their expertise. I'm glad I did as the process went smoothly and they knew the various gotchas (like removing that VIB) to watch out for.

 

[WeFixIT.ie]

Just wanted to add an update to this...

I used the ISO from Dell to upgrade the R610 last weekend. It was very straightforward...booted from the CD, chose the option to update ESXi, waited a few minutes, reboot and all done.

The reason for the upgrade was because I was unable to make quiesced snapshots and apparently this was fixed in the update. Happy days cos now I can snapshot all of the VMs...well except for the VMs with Oracle 11g but that's another kettle of fish!

Thanks for your insights.

 

[HCHTech]

I like the internal SD Cards for the VMWare install.

This is how it is done on my client with ESXi on an R720. Two enterprise SD cards in a RAID1. Twice in the last 4 years the mirror has been broken, I suspect both times were the result of a long power outage (long enough to exhaust the batteries on the UPS), then power came back on for 38 seconds, just long enough for it to start booting, then the power went off again, corrupting something.

The first time this happened, I replaced one of the SD cards as I had a spare on hand and it was mid-day so I wanted to get back up as fast as possible. The second time, it was over a weekend, so I just removed one card, then re-inserted it and rebuilt the RAID. Just something to watch out for.