A) Amen. I’ve been waiting for these releases. ESX 3.0 and VC 2.0 have some rough edges, and from the looks of the release notes it’s a lot of rough edges.
B) The documentation isn’t super clear about how to upgrade. Though, it isn’t like I read the docs real carefully. 🙂 For VirtualCenter it’s just like any other VC upgrade. Download, update everything, don’t delete your database. For ESX Server you should download the “ESX Server 3.0.1 Upgrade Package from earlier releases of ESX Server 3” option.
– Get it to your ESX Server (scp, magic, whatever you like)
– “tar xlzf 3.0.1-32039-full.tgz”
– “cd 32039/”
– “esxupdate update”
It’ll automatically reboot the ESX Server, so look out. Hey VMware, a nice future step would be to have an option of automatically downloading the updates for us. I mean, you did just bastardize YUM to bring us esxupdate. 🙂 Take it all the way!
C) The non-interactive Tools upgrade option is nice, but it reboots the guest OS. I have to do more experimenting with Linux VMs, though. The only one I have in my test environment is a RHEL 5 beta VM and it didn’t reboot, but instead just sat there without a network connection. I bet RHEL 3 and 4 work right. 🙂 The Windows XP, 2003, and 2000 VMs I have worked well.
D) Virtual Infrastructure Clients will need an upgrade, but it’s nice that the client offers to download it for you. An automatic upgrade with absolutely no user interaction would be a cool next step.
VirtualCenter seems faster, too, but I might just be imagining that.
Update: Yeah, updating VMware Tools for Linux don’t reboot the host, they just let it sit there without rebooting. I guess that’s okay — I can go either way with the reboot thing.
You can use the –noreboot flag with esxupdate to prevent it from rebooting the server.