Upgrading ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.1 with Update Manager

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 23:57:54 +0000

This turned out to be so ridiculously easy I probably shouldn’t even mention it, but only because I remembered that Update Manager exists. I thought I was going to have to burn an ISO, go to the datacenter, pop the disc in, etc. But with Update Manager this is all handled remotely. Just download the files from vmware.com and upload them to your vCenter server through the client. This YouTube video by VMware walks you through the procedure:

Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 1)

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:28:12 +0000

When vSphere 4.1 was released earlier this year, I was mildly excited. Our ESX servers are still running 4.0.0 and I had been planning to upgrade to 4.0u1 for a while. When 4.1 came out it seemed to have vindicated my procrastination: now I could just upgrade to 4.1 and take advantage of whatever new features there were (I read something about memory compression… whatever). I assumed the upgrade procedure for vCenter itself would be pretty simple: uninstall 4.0 and install 4.1. Well, it turns out that’s not the case! I sat down one day to create my game plan for the upgrade and right away I learned this was going to be a lot more work than I’d guessed. From VMware’s KB:

4.0 on Evan Hoffman

Upgrading ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.1 with Update Manager

Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 1)