Vsphere Host Update Utility Support For Rolling Back Esx/Esxi Upgrades; Roll Back An Esx Upgrade - VMware ESX 4.0 - UPGRADE GUIDE UPDATE 1 Update Manual

6 If the Reconfigure ESX 3 hosts using license servers to use this server option is selected, unselect it.
7 Click OK.
vSphere Host Update Utility Support for Rolling Back ESX/ESXi
Upgrades
When you use vSphere Host Update Utility to perform a host upgrade, the support for rolling back upgrades
differs for ESX and ESXi.
For ESX, the default behavior for vSphere Host Update Utility is to roll back the host to the previous version
of ESX if the upgrade does not complete successfully. You can override the default behavior by deselecting the
Attempt to reboot host and roll back upgrade in case of failure check box in the upgrade wizard. Disabling
the roll back allows you to debug your host if the installer fails.
For ESXi, vSphere Host Update Utility does not support roll back. However, after an upgrade, the ESXi host
might reboot into the previous version of the firmware if the upgrade version does not boot successfully. You
cannot disable this behavior. If the upgrade fails for VMware Tools or the vSphere Client, roll back is not
supported and the packages are removed from the host. The packages are removed because insufficient space
is available on ESXi for two versions of VMware Tools and two versions of the vSphere Client. vSphere Host
Update Utility must delete the previous versions before writing the new versions to disk.
After the roll back, upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 4 to obtain the latest version of ESXi 3.5 firmware, VMware
Tools and the VI Client.

Roll Back an ESX Upgrade

You might need to roll back to ESX 3.x if the upgrade to ESX 4.0 does not work as expected in your environment.
Optionally, you can remove the ESX 4.0 boot option from the ESX bootloader menu and perform a complete
roll back to ESX 3.x.
Consider the following points:
Any changes made to the ESX 4.0 service console are lost after the rollback.
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Any changes made to virtual machines will persist after the rollback.
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If you upgraded the virtual machine hardware, the virtual machines will not work after you perform the
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ESX rollback. To avoid this situation, take a snapshot of the virtual machine before you upgrade the virtual
machine hardware. After you run the ESX rollback script, boot into ESX 3.x and revert to the snapshot.
Only a system administrator can perform this optional procedure.
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Procedure
1 Run the
rollback-to-esx3
The
rollback-to-esx3
to boot into ESX 4.0.
You can include the optional
want to roll back to ESX 3.x.
2 Reboot the server.
While the host is powering on, observe that the boot menu has changed to ESX 3.x.
3 After the host boots into ESX 3.x, delete the ESX 4.0 service console VMDK folder from the VMFS datastore.
The service console VMDK folder name has the following format:
VMware, Inc.
command in the ESX 4.0 service console.
command reconfigures the bootloader to boot into ESX 3.x and removes the ability
(force) flag. If you omit the
-f
Chapter 12 Postupgrade Considerations for Hosts
flag, you are prompted to confirm that you
-f
esxconsole- <UUID>
.
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