Specifications

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Upgrade vCenter Server version 5.5. See Chapter 4, “Upgrading vCenter Server,” on page 61.
The downtime required for this upgrade is based on the amount of data in the database. During this
time, you cannot perform provisioning operations, such as cloning or creating virtual machines.
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Install the version 5.5 vSphere Web Client. See “Install or Upgrade the vSphere Web Client,” on
page 128.
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If your environment has vSphere Update Manager, upgrade it to the latest version. See Chapter 6,
“Upgrading Update Manager,” on page 139.
Procedure
1 Use vMotion to move the virtual machines from the ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0 or higher host.
2 Upgrade the host to ESXi 5.5, or perform a fresh installation of ESXi 5.5.
3 Add the ESXi 5.5 host to vCenter Server.
4 Use vMotion to move the virtual machines that you removed from the ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0 or higher host
before the upgrade.
For vMotion to work, the hosts must be managed by the same vCenter Server instance.
What to do next
For all hosts and virtual machines in the migration upgrade, take the following actions.
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Upgrade your virtual machines. See Chapter 8, “Upgrading Virtual Machines and VMware Tools,” on
page 215.
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Upgrade your product licenses:
a Get your new license keys by email, or by using the license portal.
b Apply the new license keys to your assets using the vSphere Web Client).
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Use the vSphere Web Client to upgrade the host datastore to VMFS5.
See the information about upgrading datastores to VMFS5 in the vSphere Storage documentation.
Moving Powered Off or Suspended Virtual Machines During an
Upgrade with vCenter Server
In a cold migration upgrade, you power off or suspend the virtual machines that you move to a new host.
When you use cold migration to move virtual machines, more downtime is required for the virtual
machines.
This scenario assumes that the hosts do not have vMotion capabilities.
Upgrades using cold migrations are useful for situations that require a multistep upgrade, such as upgrades
from versions lower than ESX 4.x.
Prerequisites
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Verify that one or more machines meets ESXi 5.5 requirements.
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Verify that empty host storage is sufficient to hold a portion of your production virtual machines.
Ideally, the storage is large enough to hold all of the migrated virtual machines. A larger capacity for
virtual machines on this extra storage means fewer operations are required before all your virtual
machines are migrated.
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If your environment has vCenter Guided Consolidation, uninstall it before upgrading.
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Run the Host Agent Pre-Upgrade Checker. See “Run the vCenter Host Agent Pre-Upgrade Checker,”
on page 57.
vSphere Upgrade
218 VMware, Inc.