On July 12th, VMware announced the release of vSphere 5.

With the release comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation.

However, there are a few caveats:

• vSphere 5 is the first version which comes in a ESXi version ONLY! ESXi 5 is available in an embedded or installable version. If you’re running ESX 3.x or 4.x you should do a clean installation. You can find more information here.;
• VMware changed their licensing method. Familiarize yourself with this and check if you need to upgrade/extend your licenses. You can find more information here.

Because I run a VMware vSphere 4.1 environment, this is a upgrade from vSphere 4.1 to 5.

The upgrade is a straight forward five step process.

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With the release of VMware View 4.5 comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation to this new version.

The upgrade is not that difficult but because I promised you all a ‘How to upgrade to VMware View 4.5‘ I will provide this service anyway.

Before you start first a few pointers:
1. make a back-up of the VMware View systems that you’re going to upgrade;
2. If some of your end users are using the Client with Offline Desktop, ask them to check in their View desktops;
3. when you have multiple connection servers and you are upgrading from 4.0 to 4.5, you need to disable the VMware View Connection Server service on all Connection servers. (Thanks Sven)
4. If you are using vSphere, you must have vSphere 4.0 Update 2 or vSphere 4.1. If you are using VMware Infrastructure, you must have VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 5 and VirtualCenter Server 2.5 Update 6.

Also check the official VMware View Upgrade Guide.

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With yesterdays release of vSphere 4.1 comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation to this new version. Because I have been testing the beta for a while now, I couldn´t wait to try it in our new testing environment.

However, there are a few caveats:

• VMware released a KB article with the supported upgrade methods for ESX(i) 3.0.x, 3.5 and 4 full, embedded or installable;
• Do NOT upgrade vCenter server to version 4.1 if you are using VMware View Composer 2.0.x. Check out this VMware KB article for more information.

Before you start the upgrade process, back-up the vCenter- and Update Manager databases.

After downloading the needed ISO´s, I started with the upgrade of the vCenter server.

But first of all, I had to uninstall all incompatible vCenter components, in this case Guided Consolidation 4.0.

When this is done, it´s time to update the vCenter server.

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If you haven’t upgraded to VMware vSphere 4 by now, you should consider it and rethink your strategy. VMware has removed all but the most recent versions of their Virtual Infrastructure product binaries from their download page on June 17th. As of May 2010, the following Virtual infrastructure products have all reached end of general support according to the published support policy:

• ESX 3.5 versions 3.5 GA, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4
• ESX 3.0 versions 3.0 GA, 3.01, 3.02, 3.03
• ESX 2.x versions 2.5.0 GA, 2.5.1, 2.5.2, 2.1.3, 2.5.3, 2.1.2, 2.5.4
• Virtual Center 2.5 GA, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5
• Virtual Center 2.0

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This morning I told you that VMware had released VMware View 3.1 and that I would upgrade our 3.0.1 installations to 3.1 as soon as possible and let you know how the improvements work out for us. Well, it is time.

After reading the release notes I couldn’t resist and decided to upgrade the View 3.0.1 installation at our own Service Center to version 3.1. Luckily this VDI environment is not in production yet because we are experiencing some problems with Vista customization and performance.

I downloaded all new View software (build 167577) and installed the new View agent software in all templates, installed the new View client on my laptop and installed the new View Connection server on the View virtual machine. The upgrades were very simple and straightforward. So let the fun begin……

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For those of you who have been following the launch of VMware’s new flagship vSphere 4 and are anxious to upgrade their virtual infrastructure, I ran into a great post on Mike DiPetrillo’s website.

Mike has posted four great video’s with the following scenario’s:

• Video 1 -VMware VirtualCenter Management Components
• Video 2 – VMware ESX Host Migration Methods
• Video 3 – Virtual Machine Upgrades (VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware)
• Video 4 – Implementing VMware vSphere Licensing

Interested? You can check out the videos here.

While building the virtual enviroment for a client we are getting a lot of questions about how they should handle certain aspects in their new enviroment.

One of those questions is how they should handle upgrades, best practices etc.

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Yesterday was a fun day. What looked like a simple, clean upgrade became something more interesting. After making a before snapshot I started the VirtualCenter installation wizard. Then the fun started. Nothing happened.

Let me rephrase that. NOTHING happened. Machine hung. Clicking the reboot button in the VI client caused the machine to reboot. At least, so it seemed.

The machine didn’t get back to life. VirtualCenter thought that it was in limbo, not started and not shutdown. So I restarted the management services on the ESX host, you know, service mgmt-vmware restart and I even restarted the VirtualCenter client by hand like service vpxa restart

It looked like the problem got bigger. VirtualCenter now saw the machine as invalid. Logging on the ESX host with the VI client it looked very very strange.

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