Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Upgrading ESXi for 3.5 ro 4

Well it was raining so couldn't do any work on the RattyT, So it was time to do some geek work. I have a ESXi 3/5 server running on my old workstation. To my surprise the install of ESXi 3.5 we smooth. I was expecting it to have issues with my hardware. But it installed first time.

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard with 4GB Ram
2 SATA 120GB drives not in RAID
IDE DVD Player
IDE DVD Recorder



So that got me up and running very fast. The server has two SATA drives so one was the install and the other is now data.

Its working really well, I have a Win7 & SSLVpn server currently running on it. But I wanted to try the newer version. ESXi 4.

Now to administer ESXi there is no MAC VI Client, So I have to run a windows client (Win7) in fusion on my mac to be able to install the VIClient and administer the ESX server. So I wanted to try the upgrade in place option using the VMware Host update utility.

Once I finally got in extracted from the upgrade zip file and installed on my Win7 admin vm, I struck this issue when trying to access the ESXi server. I was presented with this error.

“The type initializer for ‘VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy’ threw an exception.”
Of course it was since I am using Win7, ..... sigh

So after some hunting I found this great article, This got the vSphere Client running,

http://www.techhead.co.uk/running-vmware-vsphere-client-on-windows-7

But then when I tried to run the Upgrade utility if failed the same way. ...
More digging, another great article

http://folgaizer.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/how-to-run-vsphere-host-update-utility-on-windows-7-x64/

So go both the clients running on Win7.

Next I tried to do the upgrade .... While going through the upgrade I got half way and got this error

"Boot disk layout not supported"

I wasnt able to find a work around for this one, it was 1:30am I needed to go to bed.
So I am planning to recreate a USB boot fob running ESXi 4, This will have two benefits. Easy upgrade options and since its only a home server more things to play and learn from. But the biggest advantage is that I will free up my other 120GB hard drive for data and VMs.