Which Method to upgrade to ESXi 5

Upgrading to ESXi 5.0 – which way to go in which situation

There are several different methods on when it comes to upgrading to the latest ESXi 5.0. There are also different situations, which you might consider, before upgrading.

First, are you upgrading 3 ESXi or 30….. or even more… Which method to choose? For smaller number of hosts you can use the interactive upgrade method via DVD or via USB stick.  The installation program does upgrade the host to 5.0, gives you the possibility to migrate some existing host settings and configuration files. You also will be able to preserve the existing VMFS datastores and VMs, but VMware strongly recommends backing up your VMs.

vSphere Update Manager – I found it very easy to upgrade through the vSphere Update Manager. In addition, it handles the upgrade from ESX 4.0. So if you have a hosts running ESX 3.X you must first upgrade to ESX 4.0, before you can use the vSphere Update Manager. So it might be faster to do a clean installation of ESXi 5.0 directly…. You can find the official VMware documentation on the subject here – vSphere Upgrade Guide.

Scripted upgrade might be an option if you upgrading multiple hosts. There is the possibility to use a script upgrade ESXi by using CD, DVD, or USB stick or by PXE Installer.

vSphere Auto Deploy – this is a new feature of vSphere 5. The Auto deploy loads the ESXi image in memory, without installing locally.  This feature cannot be used to upgrade from ESX or ESXi 4 hosts traditionally installed on local disks.

Command line update option – by using esxcli you can also update (or patch) ESXi 5 hosts. But to upgrade from ESX or ESXi 4, you must use vSphere CLI.

Further Reading:

What's New in VMware vSphere 5.0 Platform Technical Whitepaper.

ESXi and vCenter Server Documentation.

Installing and Administering VMware vSphere Update Manager.