Where possible when I do an upgrade from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1 I will try do a re-installation. The installation of ESX doesn’t take that much time especially if you have all configuration settings and licenses available and it’s always nice to have a “clean” install.

But I wanted to give an upgrade a try. Sitting at home using vpn to my corporate network I only have my ssh client(putty) available, no physical access to the server and the server in question does not have any remote management (ilo, rmgt) available. Searching trough the vi3_installation_guide.pdf I came across the pretty simple procedure.

Upgrading Using esxupdate
To upgrade using esxupdate

1 Download the esxupdate tar archive bundle.
2 Extract the compressed tar archive and change to the newly created directory.
3 Type esxupdate -n update.
4 When the update command completes, reboot the ESX Server host.

I started with migrating my vm’s to another esx server just to be sure.

I downloaded the “ESX Server 3.0.1 Upgrade Package from earlier releases of ESX Server 3” from the download section on vmware.com and copied it to my esx server using winSCP and extracted the tar and followed the guide:

tar -xvzf 3.0.1-32039-full.tgz

cd 32039

esxupdate –n update (took about 12 min)

last 2 lines from the update sequence
INFO: — TOTALS: 221 packages installed, 0 pending or failed, 0 excluded —
INFO: Install succeeded – please come again.

reboot

Now I just need to install the 30+ patches that are available for 3.0.1, much more then there are for 3.0.0
Maybe it’s time for a new version Vmware ESX 3.0.2

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)