VMWare Support and Subscription

[Theblacksheep]

thanks, is this something best left 'til holidays or just go for it whenever?

Done mine at the weekend, unless you need vCenter for 1-2 hours it can be done at anytime.... the hosts will carry on running their VMs.

Hosts can also be upgraded at anytime if you have the spare capasity to move VMs over.

[andyrite]

thanks, is this something best left 'til holidays or just go for it whenever?

Depends on your setup. I've got a SAN and 3 ESxi servers. I can just take vmotion the vm's off one and update it. Upgrading vcentre can be done anytime. It doesn't affect the running of the esx servers.

[DAckroyd]

any ideas where I download the vCenter Server 4 foundation from? I finnaly found all thevCenter4u1 links but no foundation listed
thanks

[andyrite]

VMware Infrastructure 3.x Foundation is VMware vSphere 4 Standard now.

[DAckroyd]

I have a vCenter server as a VM, we've got 2 ESX hosts and they are connected to a san

I'll start with the vcenre update and then go onto a Host update - can I update one host and have the HA/vmotion still work or will that only go between the same versions of esx?

[DAckroyd]

isit worth doing a snapshot of the vcenter server before updating it?

[apaton]

It can never harm to do a snapshot, but a rollback can make things worse. Especially if you run other services on your Virtual Center box.

Good resource for upgrade info can be found here, also includes upgrade training videos.
VMware vSphere Upgrade Center Resources for Cloud Computing

Andy

[DAckroyd]

in process of upgrading atm... the VI Client/server upgrade went smoothly and first of the ESX boxes is now upgrading

EDIT: Bugger... in the ESX upgrade process I have got a:

TSC: 34771057 cpu0 :0)Init: 461: The Execute Disable/No Execute CPU feature is not enabled for this machine.

Edit: Edit: For anyone who gets this error then make sure you have the memory execute thingy enabled in BIOS and also make sure you have VT enabled

thanks for everyones help on this one - one host upgraded and happy, one to go

[DAckroyd]

ok... not good... any advice welcome...

I've got my vcenter updated and the ESX host are at version 4... however I haven't got the tools updated on all of them yesterday and one of the hosts dropped off over night and the hosts didn't migrate to the other host. I have the host that went down up but it's still showing as disconnected. and all servers that were on there are showing disconnected and I cant migrate them manually!

[Theblacksheep]

ok... not good... any advice welcome...

I've got my vcenter updated and the ESX host are at version 4... however I haven't got the tools updated on all of them yesterday and one of the hosts dropped off over night and the hosts didn't migrate to the other host. I have the host that went down up but it's still showing as disconnected. and all servers that were on there are showing disconnected and I cant migrate them manually!

Can you ping a host service console? is it alive?

Can you disconnect one host from vcenter and re-add i it in?

[DAckroyd]

VM's moved over... DNS issue somehow - I Know why!! we had an engineer in who yesterday stopped the DNS running on the server my Vcenter points at

changed vCenters dns to a different box and all was fine

still have a host not showing maycome around sometime soon - can ping IP - may reboot again in a second

[DMcCoy]

VM's moved over... DNS issue somehow - I Know why!! we had an engineer in who yesterday stopped the DNS running on the server my Vcenter points at

changed vCenters dns to a different box and all was fine

still have a host not showing maycome around sometime soon - can ping IP - may reboot again in a second

If the vSphere host does not have access to a DNS server (with an entry for it in) it will take around 15 minutes for the vsphere management to be started up after boot, although it will work as normal apart from this delay.