Patching ESX4 hosts, best practise way?

[ranj]

Hi

 

Hopefully this is an easy question for all you VMware admins.

 

I am running a 3 host esx4 cluster and very soon I want to look at patching these hosts up to a later level as I am having a few issues with our 2008R2 VM's and I think its because we are on our hosts the version which has 2008 R2 in is classed as experimental mode.

 

1 Host is running 175625 and the other 2 are running 164006 and want to get them all onto ESX4U2 (basically the one that before the latest one which doesnt require a 64bit vCenter server (we are running vcenter on a 32bit server and need to wait a while till we can order a newer server).

 

What is the best way to patch these hosts up? I was thinking of moving all VM's to 2 hosts, patch 1 host fully, reboot the host once its upgraded and then move all VM's onto the host just patched and then do the other one and so on.

 

Is it worth waiting a while between upgrading each host or can this be done one after the other just moving VM's from one host to another? All servers are identical and are HP DL380G5 with all of them having 32gb RAM. We have enough capacity to run all VM's on 2 servers if one went down for maintenance or other.

 

Our vcenter server as the update module installed, am I right in saying I can just roll the rollup package for esx4.0u2 onto each host through the update module?

 

Any advice will be most appreciated.

[apaton]

Sound like you have VUM (VMware Update Manager) already installed, I would recommend using it, and save time by avoiding manual creating esxupdate scripts. VUM documentation can be found here.

 

VUM Features

 

• Downloads ESX/ESXi patches
  
• Remediate ESX & ESXi Patches
  
• Upgrade VMtools
  
• Upgrade VM Hardware (4 to 7).
  
• Upgrade VI3 to vSphere 4.0/4.1
  
• etc..
  

Regards

 

Andy

[bio]

I also agree with andy here. VUM is your best friend here. However i find it quicker to reinstall the ESX host everytime there is an update.. U1, U2 or 4.1. Then you also have a good opportunity to check and update documentation.

 

PS i am interrested on how you are going to troubleshooting your windows 2008 R2 issues ? The versions you are running should work just fine with w2k8 r2.

BTW we also run a 3 host vsphere environment with w2k8 r2 vm's on them.

 

regards

bio..