VMware vSphere 4 Installation Guide download pdf (Page 80)

7 Click OK.

vSphere Host Update Utility Support for Rolling Back ESX/ESXi

Upgrades

When you use vSphere Host Update Utility to perform a host upgrade, the support for rolling back upgrades

differs for ESX and ESXi.

For ESX, the default behavior for vSphere Host Update Utility is to roll back the host to the previous version

of ESX if the upgrade does not complete successfully. You can override the default behavior by deselecting the

Attempt to reboot host and roll back upgrade in case of failure check box in the upgrade wizard. Disabling

the roll back allows you to debug your host if the installer fails.

For ESXi, vSphere Host Update Utility does not support roll back. However, after an upgrade, the ESXi host

might reboot into the previous version of the firmware if the upgrade version does not boot successfully. You

cannot disable this behavior. If the upgrade fails for VMware Tools or the vSphere Client, roll back is not

supported and the packages are removed from the host. The packages are removed because insufficient space

is available on ESXi for two versions of VMware Tools and two versions of the vSphere Client. vSphere Host

Update Utility must delete the previous versions before writing the new versions to disk.

After the roll back, upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 4 to obtain the latest version of ESXi 3.5 firmware, VMware

Tools and the VI Client.

Roll Back an ESX Upgrade

You might need to roll back to ESX 3.x if the upgrade to ESX 4.0 does not work as expected in your environment.

Optionally, you can remove the ESX 4.0 boot option from the ESX bootloader menu and perform a complete

roll back to ESX 3.x.

Consider the following points:

Any changes made to the ESX 4.0 service console are lost after the rollback.

Any changes made to virtual machines will persist after the rollback.

If you upgraded the virtual machine hardware, the virtual machines will not work after you perform the

ESX rollback. To avoid this situation, take a snapshot of the virtual machine before you upgrade the virtual

machine hardware. After you run the ESX rollback script, boot into ESX 3.x and revert to the snapshot.

Only a system administrator can perform this optional procedure.

Procedure

1 Run the rollback-to-esx3 command in the ESX 4.0 service console.

The rollback-to-esx3 command reconfigures the bootloader to boot into ESX 3.x and removes the ability

to boot into ESX 4.0.

You can include the optional -f (force) flag. If you omit the -f flag, you are prompted to confirm that you

want to roll back to ESX 3.x.

2 Reboot the server.

While the host is powering on, observe that the boot menu has changed to ESX 3.x.

3 After the host boots into ESX 3.x, delete the ESX 4.0 service console VMDK folder from the VMFS datastore.

The service console VMDK folder name has the following format: esxconsole-

<UUID>

vSphere Upgrade Guide

80 VMware, Inc.

1 2 ... 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 ... 109 110

No comments

VMware vSphere 4 Installation Guide Page 80