Thursday, September 8, 2011

Upgrading vCenter v4.1 to v5.0

I just upgraded my home lab vCenter server the other day from v4.1 to v5 and took some screen dumps of the installation process. The steps look fairly familiar compared to earlier versions. At one point in the installation I had an error stating that:

"The Fully Qualified Domain Name cannot be resolved. If you continue the installation, some features might not work correctly"

The reason for this error is that I had not created a reverse lookup on the DNS server. By following this guide, the issue was resolved and installation process could continue without further warnings.

Here are the screen dumps:











It was at this step that the DNS error ocurred. Below image shows how a reverse lookup zone was created on the DNS server.








Configuring iSCSI for vSphere 5

Configuring a software iSCSI initiator for ESXi 5.0 is a relatively simple operation. This quick guide assumes that you have already configured an iSCSI target and published it on the network.

For inspiration, have a look at this VMware KB

Create a new vSwitch (Configuration -> Networking -> Add Networking) and add a VMkernel. Configure it with an IP address. 


Go to Storage adapters and click "Add" to add a software iSCSI adapter if it does not exist already.



Once added, right click the software initiator and choose "properties". 


Go to Network Configuration tab and click "Add".


Choose the vSwitch/VMkernel that you created above.


Go ot Dynamic Discovery tab and click "Add" to add an iSCSI target


You will be prompted to input IP address of the iSCSI target, just leave port 3260 as default unless you have configured it differently on your target.


Go to Configuration -> Storage and click "Add storage". Click DISK/LUN and next. If everything has been done correctly, you be able to see your published iSCSI target and can then add and format it with the new VMFS5 file system, uh lala!