Installing Virtual Center 2.5 & ESX 3.5

Hi

Today I went to the VMUG event in the Netherlands which was very good again. Especially the session about ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 and a session by Eric Sloof about VDM2 beta. When I arrived home again, I found a very interesting posting on the many Virtualisation RSS feeds I browse through daily. There was the announcement of the download of ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5. Wow, I hadn’t expected it so soon after the delay on december 4th. But I ofcourse had to have it, so I started downloading. After the download had finished I first upgraded my Virtual Center 2.0.2 to VC 2.5.

My testlab at home is like this:

• Two identical systems (one is a loaner for a month), each with: One Quad Core Intel at 2.4Ghz, 8Gb RAM, 2x 400Gb SATA disks connected through SAS to an LSI Logic controller.

• Virtual Center is running in a Windows XP VM using msde database. I choose XP as OS to minimize memory usage, but lookin’ at it now, I think W2003 wouldn’t have made much difference.

Anyway, I first put the VC-VM in snapshot mode, then connected the vc25 iso and started installing. Real men don’t do backups ! (At least not untill they lose some realy important data ). When creating the snapshot through VC, the ESX host suddenly got disconnected, but fortunately just for a second or two. Snapshot succesful, so I connected the vc25 iso to the VC VM and started the installation.

After a few next, next, actions I got the question which database I would like to use. I did have MSDE installed and pointed the DSN file to this installation. Unfortunately, I then got a message explaining that this MSDE version can no longer be used and I should upgrade my database to SQL Express or another supported database. Because I was not sure how to upgrade my MSDE to SQL Express, I started installing SQL Express. The installation files can be found on the VC25 cdrom at \redist\SQLEXPR32. Again a few next next next clicks and then a question prompted me to enter the name of the SQL instance I would like to use, plus a button called “Installed Instances”. There I could select my current MSDE instance. Next I received a report telling me that the instance found could be upgraded, so I continued. Looking very good here

I now switched back to the VC 2.5 installation, which was still waiting at the “select database” screen. I again used the DSN name I used before and now I received a message telling me that the database was about to be upgraded and can no longer be used by older products. Yes, please do so Oeps, now something went wrong. I seemed to be using the “SQL Server” ODBC driver but VC wants the “SQL Native Client” driver. I tried to edit the DSN connection, but this was no longer possible. I received connection errors. I found that enabling tcp/ip on the “SQL Server 2005 network configuration” plus restarting the MSDE_VC instance helped getting connection again. I then created a new DSN but this time with the correct SQL Native driver and pointed it to the same database (the older vc 2.0.2 database). Now installation could continue.

Next question was the location of my license server and which Virtual Center edition I wanted to use. I could choose between Virtual Center Management Server and Virtual Center Foundation Management Server. I choose the first and pointed to my already running license server. Next I was asked for the VC credentials and IP address. I entered my local admin account, because my XP virtual center is not part of a domain. I’m not using any users or groups in VC, other then the local admin. This was the last question before realy starting the install. I pressed finish and the installation started. I leaned back and watch InstallShield do its work.

After a short while there was the “VMware Virtual Center Database Upgrade Wizard”. I pressed next and a short analysis was done by the wizard. It asked me which data I want to preserve during upgrade. I could choose to “Preserve events and taks” and “Preserve performance data”. I left it at default settings, which is to preserve both. Then again pressed next. I’m quite good at pressing next The wizard finished without problems and installation continued. Finaly I received the “Installation succesful” message. I pressed finish and the VI Client was started automatically and I logged on to the new VC server.

After ignoring a certificate error, I could finaly look at the new VC 2.5 interface. Very nice, very nice indeed. When looking at the already running tasks, I noticed that my first ESX host had been disconnected. It said that the VC agant could not be installed on this host. The second host didn’t have any problems. When looking at the version numbers, I noticed that the first host was at 3.0.2 build 61618 and the second at 3.0.2 build 62488. Could that be the difference? I searched the VC 2.5 CD for any docs and discovered in a readme.txt that even ESX 2.5.4 would be supported, which ofcourse makes sense. So I checked if the esx host was still running fine.

Using ssh I connected to the console and stopped the vpxa service (service vmware-vpxa stop). Then tried to reconnect the host, but VC still reported an error. Next I removed the vpxa rpm from the ESX host. I first check which version was installed using “rpm -qa | grep vpx” and noticed that it was probably VC 2.5 already: VMware-vpxa-2.5.0-64192. Still I decided to remove it, using. In VC I tried to reconnect again, but this still gave me errors. So I now removed the disconnected host from VC and then added it as a new host. Unfortunately still unable to connect the host.

I also noticed that I couldn’t run any vmware-cmd commands anylonger and a direct connection to the esx host using the VI Client was also not possible. Well, lets play tough then…. I planned to just upgrade the host to esx 3.5. Since I couldn’t use vmware-cmd to stop the VMs, all that was left, was to rdp to each VM and shut it down. Two VMs didn’t have a rdp option, so I just let them running. Then I shutdown the host, put in the esx 3.5 CD and booted from it.

Upgrade went fast and smooth. I pressed the Next button, choose the upgrade path and installation started. After install it ejected the CD and I was able to reboot into ESX 3.5. Smooth as a baby. After a few minutes I could shh into the cos and see that my most important VMs had already been started automatically as they did in ESX 3.0.2. Pfffff… lucky me :-) Next I made a RDP session into the VC server and added the ESX host. This time all went fine. I quickly ran through all the new options and was pleased to see that some nice improvements have been made. But I’m gonna talk about those tomorrow. Its 2:45AM right now and I think its better to get some sleep

See ya

Gabrie