Specifications

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If your environment has vCenter Guided Consolidation, uninstall it.
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Run the vCenter Host Agent Pre-Upgrade Checker. See “Run the vCenter Host Agent Pre-Upgrade
Checker,” on page 37.
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Upgrade VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 or higher or vCenter Server 4.0 to vCenter Server 5.0. See
Chapter 4, “Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0,” on page 27.
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 5.0 vSphere Client. See “Upgrade the vSphere Client,” on page 62.
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If your environment has vSphere Update Manager, upgrade it to the latest version. See Chapter 5,
“Upgrading Update Manager,” on page 73.
Procedure
1 Use vMotion to move the virtual machines from the ESX 3.5/ESXi 3.5 or higher host.
2 Upgrade the host to ESXi 5.0, or perform a fresh installation of ESXi 5.0.
3 Add the ESXi 5.0 host to vCenter Server.
4 Use vMotion to move the virtual machines that you removed 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
For all hosts and virtual machines in the migration upgrade, take the following actions.
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Upgrade your virtual machines. See Chapter 7, “Upgrading Virtual Machines,” on page 147.
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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 Client (or vCenter Server if you have
it).
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Use the vSphere 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. Such upgrades require upgrading to ESX 4.x and then upgrading to ESXi
5.0.
Prerequisites
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Verify that one or more machines meets ESXi 5.0 requirements.
vSphere Upgrade
172 VMware, Inc.