Attempted to upgrade vCenter 4 to vCenter 5.
Built new vCenter 64bit server for VCenter 5- tried to upgrade the remote Virtual Center 32bit SQL DB - no luck.
Decided instead then to migrate the DB to a local SQL Express instance on the new 64bit VCenter server - no luck.
Anyway, somewhere along the line the upgrade process caused havoc with the existing vCenter 4 configuration and I could no longer launch VCenter 4 - services wouldn't start - 0x2 errors amongst other things, failed logon in Event Viewer even though nothing changed here. Tried resetting password to no avail.
At this stage, I decided to just rebuilt VCenter from scratch. New vCenter 5 installation on the new server, new local installation of SQL Express. Re-added hosts - everything working fine :-)
- My only real concern is regarding licenses. When I re-added my hosts to the new vCenter 5 I got a warning saying to "Remove License Key from original inventory" - the problem here is that I can't access the old vCenter 4 to remove these keys. Can this be done manually (config files?, database record deletion?) as I obviously want to be compliant?
- My original database was 4-5 times larger than my new one (even after I have added the hosts). Why would this be? Our existing vCenter installation was fairly simple i.e. no add-ons etc. so what "additional" fata would have been held on the database? I assume it is too late to "migrate" any additional data I might be missing (although I don't seem to be missing any functionality in my new setup anyway).