Big release today for the VMware vSphere 4.1 suite. Depending on the size of the environment you support, you’re either cheering at the small amount of work ahead of you, or sobbing because you just recently got everything updated to 4.1 😉
Here’s a quick look at what’s been updated:
- vCenter Server 4.1 U1 – Release Notes
- Update Manager – Release Notes
- Guided Consolidation – plugin
- vCenter Converter – plugin
- Orchestrator – Release Notes
- ESX 4.1 U1 – Release Notes
- ESXi 4.1 U1 – Release Notes
Things of note with these releases:
- ESX and ESXi 4.1 U1 now support 160 logical processors
- ESX and ESXi 4.1 U1 now support RHEL 6, RHEL 5.6, SLES 11 SP1 for VMware, Ubuntu 10.10, and Solaris 10 Update 9 guest operating systems
- ESXi 4.1 U1 supports trusted boot using Intel Trusted Execution Technology, available with the XEON 5600 processors. More info
- vCenter now supports guest customization on Windows 7/2008 R2 SP1, RHEL 5.5, and RHEL 6.0
- vCenter now supports updated versions of previously supported databases (SQL 2005 & 2008, Oracle 11g, DB2)
- Update Manager support for guest remediation will no longer be supported after this release
According to VMware’s Patch Download site, here are the following upgrade file sizes (the KB articles have different file sizes listed):
[shameless self-promotion]
Be sure to check out my articles on leveraging PowerCLI for controlling Update Manager patch staging, and automating cluster remediation without DRS.
[end shameless self-promotion]
The ISO Cd does not do an upgrade unless there is some special way to do it
also how do I upgrade from the ZIP file
Ben, check out http://damiankarlson.com/2011/02/17/upgrade-vmware-esxi-4-1-free-to-u1/
how do I update esxi 4.1 to 4.1u1 on a free single esxi server?
Hi Ben, thanks for commenting. If you go to http://www.vmware.com/go/get-free-esxi and login, there are downloads available with the ZIP or ISO version of the upgrade from ESXi 4.1 to ESXi 4.1 U1. Since you don’t have vCenter (and by extension, no VUM, and probably no vMA), the easiest way to do the update would be to boot to the upgrade ISO. This will be disruptive to any VMs that you have running on the ESXi host.