VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

Up until a week ago, I hadn’t had the pleasure to work a lot with vSphere. Now with a test environment at the customer site I was able to freely play a bit with vSphere. One of the features I was curious on trying was Fault Tolerance (FT). I just created a random VM and enabled FT on it which all went fine.

After FT was enabled on the VM we wanted to see how we could upgrade the ESX hosts in that cluster as the documentation states that FT only works on hosts with the same build number.

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Yesterday we did an upgrade from an ESX 3.5 host to ESX 4.0 using the VMware Upgrade Manager. I must say it’s cool to see how you can upgrade your ESX hosts and after that you can schedule the updates for your virtual machines with a virtual hardware upgrade version 7 and new VMware Tools.

There are some prerequisites for upgrading ESX 3.5 hosts to ESX 4.0 by using the VMware Upgrade Manager. Make sure you upgrade your vCenter server to vCenter Server 4.0 and make sure you have updated vCenter Update Manager 1.0 to version 4.0 before attempting to upgrade your ESX hosts.

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Recently I experienced problems with VMware Update Manager. When working with the virtual infrastructure the VI client suddenly displays a message stating that my session with VMware Update Manager was no longer valid and that the plugin would be unloaded. At first I suspected that network issues were the cause of the problem as at this client site we have separate vCenter and Update Manager servers for security reasons. So I created a affinity rule keeping both servers together to rule out network issues between the two servers. Unfortunately the error messages kept popping up. I had no idea what to do and was thinking about accepting this issue but this goes against my nature and pride. (more…)