I’d been struggling to understand the process and files needed to do this upgrade easily. What prompted me of course was when the additional 4GB of RAM on my aging Dell Dimension 9200 refused to be recognized and I remembered that my spare Hewlett-Packard Workstation xw8400 sitting in the office lab.
Officially the Dell in most configurations only supports 4GB but per experience it will accommodate 8GB, if only for a few months at a time. The HP on the other hand officially supports between 16~32GB when configured correctly. So, it was time to swap out work machines.
The bummer here of course is that the HP was already pre-configured with VMware ESXi 4.0 and the legacy Virtual Machines are still important until the end of this year by my estimates. None of the tools and instructions I have demonstrates easy image migration (or perhaps none of my current free licenses?).
So there I was driving home from a family event and then it hit me. What if I restructured my network such that the old ESXi would be in a manageable segment where I had a working VMware Sphere 4.1/5.0 Client running under Windows 7? A quick note here, trying to run versions of these clients on an old IBM x40 Thinkpad with Windows XP totally blows — save yourself some headaches and try better machines.
Initially the idea was to upgrade from VMware ESXi 4.0 to 4.1 using the apparently easy instructions found here. Since I’d brought home the HP for easier access it was now trivial to just use the working vSphere client to upload the upgrade files to the ESXi 4.0 datastore. Success!
I figured that would be the end of it and it was time to try my luck at moving the images. But, wait! Why not look for an ESXi 4.1 to 5.0 upgrade path? After all, my install CD’s for VMware ESXi 5.0 were already on hand so could there be a way to use it like an upgrade? The answer apparently is “YES!” and instructions for that I found were here. Success!
Its now time for the most important and the point of the whole exercise — how to migrate/move the old images off the HP and onto my newly configured iSCSI Target hosted on the QNAP TS-859+. For that, I’ll post a different set of updates.
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