Rollback ESXi 4.1 from vCenter 5.1 to vCenter 4.1

[vmstoani]

Hi,

At the moment i'm on upgrading our vSphere 4.1 Enviroment to 5.1.

SSO, Inventory Service, vCenter Server and Web Client will be installed on differnt servers. All servers ar fresh installed. I took a dump of the 4.1 database and restored it with another db name. This dump will be taken for vCenter 5.1.

As SSO and Inventory Service are installed, i will stop the vCenter 4.1 and start with installation of vCenter 5.1.

And now i'm not sure what happens with those 60 ESXi 4.1 servers which actually are registered in vSphere 4.1

Are all ESXi serves automaticly integrated in vCenter 5.1?

And what happens if there are any issues and i have to stop vCenter 5.1 and start vCenter 4.1 again (Rollback to vSphere 4.1)?

Are all ESXi 4.1 servers in vSphere 4.1 registered again?

regards

Andi

[dales123]

It all really depends on how far you get the migration, once youv'e upgraded the virtual hardware and or tools of the vm there is no turning back. However dont forget that the vm's are actually registered on the esxi servers. All you need to do is once youv'e built the vcenter5.1 server login to it with the vi client and add the hosts in again and I will pull in all the settings of the registered vm's with each host. Once the old vcenter has been shutdown.

If you do it that way install update manager and you can upgrade your esxi servers to 5.1 automatically.

[vmstoani]

First thank's for this quick answer 😉

The only thing what will be upgraded at the moment ist vCenter Server. We need to check first that all admins can login and no other errors appear.

So i think we can rollback as long as we have'nt update ESXi host and Virtual HW.

Also if the ESXi have been migrated into vCenter Server 5.1

Right?

[vmstoani]

What I've forgotten - the used DB for vCenter Server 5.1 is a clone of the actually vCenter 4.1.

[dales123]

I'm not sure about cloning the database to be honest. Whenever I have upgraded /migrated between versions its usually quick and easier to recreate the settings manually unless you have a crazy sized vsphere farm. Other things you'll need to consider is do you have any services that tie into vcenter such as veeam, vmware view, xendesktop or host based av as they will need reconfiguring too.

I would look around for a white paper on cloning the database just to make sure it'll upgrade correctly on a new vcenter box.

[vmstoani]

I will open an support case and ask vmware for a howto.

Thank's

best regards

Andi

[a_p_]

Just in case you run into issues with the HA/FDM agent, keep http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003714 in mind.

André

[vmstoani]

stored in my brain 😉

thx

andi