Before i decided to upgrade the virtual hardware from version 4 to version 7 i googled a bit to find out if i would run into some issues. At that time i didn’t find anything.

  • The question i had myself was if the mac address will change because some license servers need the same mac address. The answer is no.

some lessons learned

  • Disks on windows 2008 will go offline after the upgrade.  This is highlighted in VMware Knowledge Base article 1013109: “Upgrading virtual hardware in ESX 4 may cause Windows 2008 disks to go offline“.  The problems described in the article are unique to Windows 2008 Enterprise and Datacenter editions only.
  • Windows 2003 NLB cluster nodes will be destroyed (offline). I found out myself that the upgrade script cannot reconfigure the nlb cluster nodes. You have to connect to the node which is not upgraded and re add the node.
  • The hardware upgrade will reboot the server once, many applications need an extra reboot to function correctly. This is because windows will discover the new hardware. For the rest i couldn’t get the answer why it needed an extra reboot.

 

After the upgrade you can decide to also change some hardware within the os. I would like to refer to the post of Scott Lowe and these upgrade instructions.

Another great post of vmtoday is also worth reading.