vSphere 5 Upgrade: VM Tools and Virtual Hardware

Per Its Time vSphere 5 Upgrade, time to upgrade VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware.  I'm happy to report that both of these steps completed w/o issue.  After the previous 4.1 upgrade, the VMware Tools upgrade corrupted one of my Windows 2000 VMs.  VMware claimed it was a Microsoft problem, Microsoft claimed it was a VMware problem.  Love the finger-pointing guys!  Anyway, I made sure this VM was upgraded (actually replaced) with a Windows 2008 R2 server and we updated the application while we were at it - a win/win in my book.

No problems this time (phew!).

The only other thing I did differently compared to my previous upgrade was upgrade the SQL and vCenter servers first.  vUpdate Manager will skip these VMs anyway.

vSphere 5 Upgrade: ESXi Hosts

Per Its Time vSphere 5 Upgrade, the ESXi host upgrades.  Not much to report here.  The upgrades completed w/o issue per vUpdate Manager.

Note that I had to force remediation.  Then I enabled "remove incompatible packages".  I didn't seem to loose anything after the upgrade.  Maybe it removed the HP bundles that were installed for ESXi 4.1?

ERROR: ExtPart - Cannot find C: Drive

ExtPart threw this error on a Windows Server 2003 R2 64bit system that just had logical disk 0 extended.
ExtPart does support 32 and 64bit Windows Server 2003 R1/R2 (needs to be extracted via 32bit Windows or a tool such as 7zip).

My guess was that the command interpreter was not "seeing" the newly extended local disk space.  Sure enough, a reboot fix 'er right up!

I highly recommend both tools be a part of any administrator's toolbag:
Dell's ExtPart Tool
7-zip

Removing a VMFS Datastore

To remove VMFS datastores in the past, I always made sure there were no VMs left on the datastore, right-clicked and chose "Delete".  Well, apparently thats the wrong way to do it!  I must have been lucky, as VMware claims this method could result in an APD (All Paths Down) state.  If you don't know what that is, let me tell you it's bad (I have experienced this but for a different reason).  Your host(s) will lose access to storage.

I stumbled upon this vSphere blog post that has the procedure to remove a datastore the right way: Best Practice: How to correctly remove a LUN from an ESX host

UPDATE: For ESXi 5.0, I found it better to follow the KB mentioned in that blog post:
Unpresenting a LUN in ESXi 5.x

For ESXi 5.0, here's how I do a slightly modified vesion of the procedure listed in the post above with more information on items such as HA:

1. Make sure all VMs are evacuated from the datastore/LUN.
2. Using Datastore Browser, make sure there aren't any left-over directories or files.  If there are, delete them (make sure they can safely deleted first, of course).  Exception: the HA directory - you'll remove that a different way later.  Also note that you won't be able to delete a file if it's in use.
3. Make sure all vSphere features are disabled for the datastore (i.e. SIOC, Storage DRS)
1. HA Datastore Heartbeating:  There may be some cases where HA has chosen the datastore you're trying to remove.  In this case, edit cluster settings and change Datastore Heartbeating to "select only from my preferred datastores", then select at least three datastores other than the one you're trying to remove.  I highly recommend changing this setting back to "Select any of the cluster datastores" after you're finished removing this one.
4. Next, for each host, go to Configuration\Storage\Datastores View, right-lick on the datastore and choose "unmount":
1. The "Unmount Datastore Wizard" appears. Make sure all hosts are selected.
2. Click next.  Hopefully the next step will look like this:
   
3. Click "Next" then "Finish".  After a minute the datastore will be grayed-out and italicized.
5. Then go to Configuration\Storage\Devices View, right-lick on the datastore and choose "detach"
1. You get a pop-up dialog window similar to the one show above.  Choose "OK.  The device will be grayed-out and italicized after a few seconds.
6. Go in to your SAN and remove LUN masking/unpresent the LUNs to the ESXi hosts.
7. Finally, right-click on your cluster and choose "Rescan for Datastores".  You may get a StorageConnectivityAlarm alert for every host in your cluster unless you disable this alert first.

I like to go into every host and check the storage adapter for the LUN just to make sure but I haven't found a problem with this procedure yet.

ERROR: com.vmware.converter - Unable to retrieve health data from https://...

Some minor fall-out from the vCenter 5 upgrade...

The vCenter Service Status component displayed an alert for "com.vmware.converter".  The interesting thing is, this plugin is no longer available in vCenter 5!  I did uninstall Converter before the upgrade so I'm not sure why this ended up there, however the following KB does fix the problem.  Note that I did not have to stop the vCenter Server service and I only had to run ADSI Edit on the vCenter instance at my recovery site.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2006132

vSphere 5 Upgrade: vCenter and vUpdate Manager

Let me say upfront that had I tested the upgrade against clones of the productions VMs, I would have found these problems ahead of time (note to self for future upgrades!).

I followed the steps published in Its Time: vSphere 5 Upgrade so the first component to get upgraded was the vCenter instance at the recovery site.  This completed successfully - no errors - so far so good.

Next up, vCenter upgrade at the protected site.  The database upgrade step failed(!).  The installer gave a fairly generic error: "database upgrade failed. See the log at...".  The log only mentioned: "failed to execute dbuhelper.exe: an error occurred".

A quick Google search finds the log error posted in a VMware Communities post (TGfVC! - thank goodness for VMware Communities!).  The resolution: set the log file growth to unrestricted.  Sure enough, my log file was set to restricted so I changed it, re-ran the install and viola, success!

That evening, I reconfigured the vCenter Linked Mode feature but they never seemed to reconnect.  By time I came in to work the next morning, it had started working.  I must not have been patient enough(?), not sure but it has worked fine since.

Finally (for this step), vUpdate Manager upgrade.  This went smoothly just as it did in the lab.  Now that its working, I can start upgrading the ESXi hosts.

ERROR: Call "ServiceDirectory.QueryServiceEndpointList" for object "ServiceDirectory" on vCenter Server

Not sure what causes this error.  Google search returned very few hits.  The only solutions proposed:

• Disable Routing and Remote Access service.
• Restart vCenter Server service.

The Routing and Remote Access service was already disabled so I just restarted the vCenter Server service and the error went away.

I'll update this post if a root cause ever presents itself.