Blue Gears: vSphere Upgrade, use Host Profiles to Save Time

Using Host Profiles with a vSphere Upgrade, even if you do not have an Enterprise Plus license, will save time.

If you have to upgrade a VMware VI3 Cluster it may be best to use Host Profiles at least temporarily while you complete the cluster upgrade.

A gotcha however is that the VUM upgrade will not transfer to the new installation your existing file system layout, instead it will link to the older files (so you can perform upgrades) and only create the /boot, /, and /var/log file systems that VMware ESX does by default. This will break some existing security settings and requirements for DISA as well as other security guidance.

To use Host Profiles you will need to use VMware vCenter and VMware ESX 4 in evaluation mode unless you own Enterprise Plus licenses, this will give you 60 days to complete the migration. The clock starts ticking the moment you install VMware vCenter.

First, you will need to setup VMware Update Manager (VUM), by importing into it the contents of the ISO you downloaded for VMware ESX or ESXi. Once the ISO is imported you then need to attach a baseline to your ESX 3 host and point it to the update and not patch settings. This is covered within the VMware ESX/VC Upgrade Guide. VUM will require 20GBs of space to do this.

First ensure all VMs have been migrated off the first host. I usually do this by hand instead of relying on maintenance mode. This way I can ensure all is done before I proceed with the upgrade.

I then place the host in maintenance mode.

I then perform the upgrade using VUM. This does not take long. Once this is completed, I hook the host up to VMware vCenter 4, which will require you to login as root once more. Once this is completed, you can use this one machine as the basis for Host Profiles which will preserve your virtual networks and other ESX settings that you can configure via the VI SDK. Note this does not include any service console specific security settings as these need to be changed from the command line.

After the first machine was upgraded, I then moved all the VMs to it, and reinstalled the second node of my cluster. Yes a re-install. I updated its virtual network and settings using host profiles after I joined the newly installed host to VMware vCenter. Repeat for all other nodes in the cluster.

Once the other nodes were available, I moved any VMs that ended up on the original node and reinstalled it as well, once more utilizing Host Profiles to ensure my virtual networks and other ESX settings are there.

Host Profiles certainly saves time on upgrades of this nature and allowed me to quickly go to vSphere ESX 4 once all the right pieces were in place! Now I just need to put my security settings back into play.

• Software
• Host Profiles
• Texiwill
• vCenter
• Vsphere
• VUM