This tutorial will provide you with the steps to successfully upgrade your VMware ESXi 4 hosts to ESXi 5 by utilizing vCenter Update Manager 5. You must download the ESXi 5 Hypervisor iso image before starting this tutorial. The image will be used for the ESXi 5 Upgrade. It can be downloaded from VMware.
Upgrading to VMware ESXi 5
1. Open vCenter, select Home – Solutions and Applications – Update Manager in your address bar. Select ESXi Images Tab.



















All the tutorials included on this site are performed in a lab environment to simulate a real world production scenario. As everything is done to provide the most accurate steps to date, we take no responsibility if you implement any of these steps in a production environment.
Will this work in my case? We got two new pre-installed ESXi 4.1 & would like to upgrade to 5. This is the first cluster to be on ESXi 5. Do I have to make a trip to datacenter?
yes, your esxi hosts don’t need to be in a cluster to upgrade them. They
can be stand alone. Just put the host that you are upgrading into
maintenance mode first and then begin the upgrade.
Thanks David. It worked like a charm. To add for other newbies like me, here’s what I did. My ESXi servers were located 100 miles away and this is the first set of servers in that Colo. I install a server 2k8 R2 guest on one of the hosts. Installed vCenter server on it and added both hosts with evaluation license(I only had esxi5 license). Upgrade the other host per above post. Then copied the VMDK to other host and upgrade the 1st host. Now both are working just fine. 🙂
Hi Prashanth, that’s great news. I’m just not sure what you meant by you copied the vmdk to the other host ? Can you explain what you did there ?
yes, your esxi hosts don’t need to be in a cluster to upgrade them. They can be stand alone. Just put the host that you are upgrading into maintenance mode first and then begin the upgrade.
Check your storage! A lot are no longer compatible with VMware 5 I wrote up an article on a good workaround here – involves a proxy between ESXi and incompatible storage:
http://duaneshippy.myadventures.org/?filename=Reuse-Storage-No-Longer-Supported-by-VMware