My Journey to vSphere - The Beginning

Posted on 2 mins read

My policy is not to update to new releases until they have stabilized for a decent period of time.

Therefore, we have not yet performed our upgrade to Version 4.0 yet. We were waiting for the release of Update 1 before migrating the system to version 4.

I have been using ESX4 since the private Beta, but not on a production environment.

Over the upcoming period I will share with you the process of the upgrade from 3.5 to 4.1.

First off, I will not perform the upgrade until the latest release stabilizes a bit, and the “oversights” that have and will pop up - calm down. I actually find this a good sound idea,

But just to lay out the Migration Plan:

  1. Installation of a new vCenter - 4.1
  2. Migration of environment to the new vCenter (this will probably be the most lengthy part)
  3. Upgrade ESX Hosts 1 by 1
  4. Upgrade VM’s to Virtual Hardware Version 7
  5. Project complete.

It may look simple - but when dealing with a production environment and with so many dependencies - nothing is that simple.

I hope that the sharing of my experiences will be able to help those in their journey through the virtual universe (and also as a by-product, document my stages for the future reference).