Hi,
I am mid way through my upgrade from VC 2.0.1 / ESX 3.0.1 to VC 2.5 update 1 / ESX 3.5 update 1 and I would like to know if there is a minimum VMTools version for the VM's during the ESX 3.0.1 to ESX 3.5u1 upgrade stage.
My environment is as follows -1 VC Server (Physical), 3 ESX Servers (all with Enterprise licenses) and I am using HA/DRS/VMotion to migrate live VM's during the upgrade.
I patched all 3 ESX 3.0.1 servers to build 77862 (as seen from VC) / build 81859 (as seen from command line 'vmware -v') and I have successfully upgraded from VC 2.0.1 to VC 2.5u1 (it took a day to iron out all the 'issues' - but I got there..!)
I can now see that some of my VM's VMTools are showing as out of date and some are OK. I ran a SQL query against the VC database and extracted the VMTools version information for each VM. The VM's that are OK are version 43424 and those that are out of date are version 41412. I upgraded one VM's VMTools and it is now showing as version 81859.
Now for the question... Should I upgrade some or all of the VMTools to the latest version (i.e. version 81859) before the ESX upgrade - knowing that when I do upgrade the ESX servers to 3.5u1 there will be another version of VMTools to upgrade to...?
I can get VM downtime, but I would obviously prefer to have one VMTools upgrade/reboot cycle (after the ESX 3.5u1 upgrades have completed)... and not the interim upgrade/reboot before upgrading the ESX servers...
Any thoughts?
Martin