Performed an VMware ESXi 4.0 to 4.1 Update: 5 minutes of work

Thanks to an excellent post by Peter Sebastian from Jargon Technology, it was a breeze to upgrade.

I did the upgrade using Using the vMA virtual appliance, the statements are these:

After bringing the ESXi 4.0 box into maintenance mode, I performed these steps on an SSH connection to the vMA virtual appliance:

[vi-admin@localhost ~]$ cd /tmp
[vi-admin@localhost tmp]$ wget -m -np ftp://192.168.71.190/esxi41/upgrade-from-ESXi4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release.zip
[vi-admin@localhost tmp]$ vihostupdate -url https://192.168.71.193/sdk/webservice -i -bundle 192.168.71.190/esxi41/upgrade-from-ESXi4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release.zip
Enter username: root
Enter password:
Please wait patch installation is in progress ...
The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
[vi-admin@localhost tmp]$ rm -rf 192.168.71.190/

This literally took less than 5 minutes to complete, including rebooting the ESXi box.

The whole process of taking backups took about a day :-)

When you read this, that update has been about 2 months ago, and it has been running fine ever since.

–jeroen

via: Jargon Technology » How to Perform an ESXi 4.0 to 4.1 Upgrade.