I recently upgraded my Vmware Vcenter (sic) 3 installation to the latest and greatest Version 4 which has been out for a while. I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of the inplace upgrade that is required before upgrading any ESX 3.5 hosts that the Vcenter comtrols. Once upgraded I did have some issues regarding the addition of licenses for the new release of Vcenter. This was resolved with a call to licensing support (thanks Tarique for working late) – which is actually the second time I’ve been missing important license codes in the VMware licensing forum. However once the license key gremlins were banished I was able to complete the licensing – which is much simpler that the older style license server which in my case resided on the Vcenter server and was used to police the available esx licenses. According to Vmware this new license key approach will drastically simplify the requirements and the work needed to maintain the licenses an organisation holds.
First impressions of the new Vcenter layout is that it does give more options than before but I did find myself searching in at least two places for an option I need to update but it does seem to be at least as stable and functional as the previous and with this bugbear of a license server heading for the dustbin its a worthwhile update for those running vcenter with support contracts.
Heres to the next stage of upgrading the ESX hosts themselves.