Installation guide

5 If your environment has vCenter Guided Consolidation, complete the consolidation plan and then

upgrade it to the latest version.

6 If your environment has vCenter Update Manager, upgrade it to the latest version.

Procedure

1 Use vMotion to evacuate the virtual machines from the ESX 3.5/ESXi 3.5 or higher host.

2 Upgrade to ESX 4.1/ESXi 4.1, or perform a fresh installation of ESX 4.1/ESXi 4.1.

3 Add the ESX 4.1/ESXi 4.1 host to vCenter Server.

4 Use vMotion to move the virtual machines that you evacuated from the ESX 3.5/ESXi 3.5 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

1 Upgrade your virtual machines:

a If they are not already powered on, power on the virtual machines and upgrade to the latest version

of VMware Tools. This upgrade allows you to use the new features of ESX 4.1/ESXi 4.1.

b Power off the virtual machines and upgrade to the latest version of virtual hardware to take advantage

of the new virtual hardware. vSphere 4.1 supports some earlier virtual hardware versions. See the

vSphere Datacenter Administration Guide.

Upgrade VMware Tools before you upgrade the virtual hardware.

You can use either the vSphere Client or vCenter Update Manager to upgrade virtual machines. In a

clustered environment, VMware recommends that you use vCenter Update Manager . See the vSphere

Update Manager Administration Guide. If you are using the vSphere Client to upgrade virtual machines, see

Chapter 11, “Upgrading Virtual Machines,” on page 73.

2 Upgrade your product licenses:

a Either your new license keys are sent to you in email, or you get them using the license portal.

b Apply the new license keys to your assets using the vSphere Client (or vCenter Server if you have it).

You must perform these tasks for each host and the virtual machines on the hosts.

Moving Powered Off or Suspended Virtual Machines During an Upgrade

(with vCenter Server)

This scenario is known as a cold migration upgrade. When you use cold migration to move virtual machines

from one host to another host, additional 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 scenarios in which a multi-step upgrade is required, such as

upgrades from versions lower than ESX 3.5. Such upgrades require upgrading to ESX 3.5 and then upgrading

to ESX 4.1.

Prerequisites

The requirements for a cold migration upgrade are as follows:

One or more machines meeting ESX 4.1/ESXi 4.1 requirements.

Empty host storage sufficient to hold a portion of your production virtual machines. Ideally, the storage

should be 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.

Chapter 12 Example Upgrade Scenarios

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