1:00 AM
El DiPablo
I just successfully completed a data center move over the weekend. We moved from a crappy data center on one part of town, to a new awesome data center on the other part of town. What makes the new data center so awesome you ask? Well, besides newer, and better power generators, they also have a pool table and foosball table in the break room! In fact, it happens to be the same data center that we used at my last gig, so I get to see all the bright smiley faces of my former co-workers when I go there!
Anyhoo, since I moved data centers this gave me an unusual opportunity to revamp the network to my liking. During the move I reconfigured our core switches, and iSCSI networks to make them more efficient. I also was able to re-do all the cabling and implement some color coding to organize the cables better. I was also able to implement the new SAN I've been talking about, and finally I decided it was time to upgrade my VMware environment to 4.1 from 4.0.
I decided to build a new vCenter server, and migrate my hosts to it, then upgrade each host. After I installed vCenter 4.1, and the vSphere client I realized that the host update utility was no longer available. That sucks, because I am used to using that. That's okay though because VMware wants you to use the VMware Update Manager instead which is a plug-in to your vSphere client. It turns out upgrading ESX or ESXi to version 4.1 using the VMware Update Manager is pretty easy. Check out this video:
Pretty easy right? The VMware Update Utility is better in my opinion because it updates way more than just VMware components. You can also patch your VM hosts with it as well.
What do you like better? This way? The old way using the Host Update utility? How about using the CLI? Let us know in the comments.
del.icio.us tags: how to, upgrade, vmware, esx, esxi, 3.5, 4.0, to 4.1, host update utility, updatemanager
