vSphere Maintenance

Now that all three ESXi Hosts are joined to The Towers vSphere Data Center, I am using the vSphere Host Update Utility to make sure that all hosts are patched to the same level from the base (vSphere 4.0 Update 1).

I have been trying to figure out a way to move the vCenter Server VM (Win2k3) to my Utility host but there is an obvious catch-22 doing that, since vCenter needs to be active in order to do a cold migrate and I am still fighting the war of CPU versions for vMotion to function.

During patching of the esxi-cresskill-175 (new name for the Dell 745 utility host), I realized that the only way to do this is to log into esxi-westwood-140 (new name for Dell 780 host), shutdown vCenter Server and make a local Datastore copy of the files. Then, copy the new folder out to the new NFS shared storage on cresskill once vCenter is back up.

In the future, things like vCenter will always sit on shared storage.

For future reference, the new build host with the Intel D975XBX motherboard and Intel E6700 CPU will now be referred to as esxi-northvale-195 or "northvale" for short.