Sunday, November 27, 2011

ESXi 3.5 to 4.1 upgrade

Last year I wrote about my 3.5 to 4.0 upgrade adventures. This weekend we scheduled a 3.5 to 4.1 upgrade, assuming it will be a smooth ride (apart from moving 4TB of data).

The first issue was that 4.1 didn't want to boot from the new pendrive. Assuming I did something wrong with the imagedd.bz2 file, I tried it a few times more, wasting about 3 hours. Turns out the box didn't like the Veritech pendrive somehow. Running from a Silicon Power one went like a charm.

Second issue: the LVM.resignature config option disappeared from the ESXi advanced config. Our new friend is the esxcfg-volume command-line utility.

Use
exscfg-volume -l
to list the volumes, and
esxcfg-volume -r
to resignature (and rename) your volumes.

On a related note, ESXi 5.0 does not use the imagedd.bz2 file anymore, so I didn't even start to experiment with it (I wasted too much time on trivial stuff during the upgrade anyway).

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