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Upgrading vSphere 4.1 to 5.1 using VUM July 17, 2013

Posted by vbry21 in VMware Training.
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One of the many courses I teach is the VMware What’s New 5.1 course.

The first real module of that course covers the in place upgrade of VMware vSphere ESX 4.1 to VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1.

The problem with the course is that I quite like to demo things, and demoing the upgrade could take up to an hour, this means lots of bored delegates watching blue bars.

So I decided to create a little demo video using my Camtasia software.

The process in brief for upgrading is as follows.

  1. Ensure that the hardware and software in your environment meet the vSphere 5.1 requirements. For example, vCenter Server does not support 32-bit guest operating systems. For the complete list of requirements, see vSphere Upgrade Guide.
  2. Back up the vCenter Server database and the ESXi host configuration files. Also, back up the virtual machines on your local VMFS file system and the virtual machines on VMFS file systems that you want to upgrade to VMFS-5. Backing up is crucial to ensure that you can restore your previous configuration and that you do not lose data during the upgrade.
  3. Upgrade your vCenter Server instance to vCenter Server 5.1.
  4. Upgrade Update Manager to Update Manager 5.1. Update Manager is used to upgrade ESXi hosts as well as a virtual machine’s hardware and VMware Tools.
  5. Install the vSphere Client 5.1 and install the Update Manager plug-in for the vSphere Client.
  6. Use Update Manager to upgrade your ESX/ESXi hosts to ESXi 5.1. Some updates require that a host enter maintenance mode before remediation. Virtual machines and virtual appliances cannot run when a host is in maintenance mode. So, to maintain virtual machine availability, use VMware vSphere® vMotion® to migrate virtual machines and appliances to other hosts. Or, to reduce the host remediation downtime, you can shut down or suspend virtual machines and appliances before remediation begins.
  7. Upgrade your VMFS-3 datastores to VMFS-5.
  8. Upgrade your virtual machine hardware to hardware version 9 and upgrade VMware Tools to the version that is shipped with ESXi 5.1.

 

 The first demo video covers steps 1-6.

The second demo video covers steps 7 and 8. (Just to break things up and so that you don’t get completely bored.)