Upgrading vMA from 4.0 to 4.1

I upgraded my vSphere Management Assistant appliance this week from 4.0 to 4.1 and thought I would share the process and results.  While it's not required, I did this as a house-keeping item that's on my list before upgrading vSphere 4.0 to 4.1 - actually, it started by needing to update VMware Tools.

The tools pre-installed with the original appliance were out of date.  After some investigation, I found that the appliance upgrade does not update VMware Tools, this has to be done manually.  So first I upgraded the appliance.

The release notes for 4.1 are wrong(!).  The "vma-update" command doesn't exist until after the upgrade.  You must use "vima-update" so the command will look like this: "sudo vima-update update".  I also found that after the upgrade, both commands worked!  VMware should really make this distinction in their documentation.

This will update everything, and by everything I mean even the OS which changes from Redhat to CentOS.  If you have a lot a scripts make sure you snapshot the VM before upgrading.  If you're using the appliance as your syslog server, also check to make sure logging is still running:  /var/log/syslog/[FQDN of host].

If you'd like to setup syslogging, see Using vMA as Your ESXi Syslog Server.

Finally you'll want to update VMware Tools using the standard installation and upgrade procedure for the Linux OS.

Other relevant links:
vSphere Management Assistant Documentation
vSphere Management Assistant 4.1 Release Notes
vSphere Management Assistant 4.1 Guide