I’ve been doing some internal upgrades recently and noticed a few things that could cause some grief down the track. But firstly, this comic is really neat.  The release notes for ESX 3.5 and 3i have been out a little while and are being updated frequently with information regarding some slightly hairy situations that have arisen in the wild. Read them here. One of the issues I encountered (after I’d read about it) was on our Development environment – “ESX Server 3.5.0 Might Require Manual RPM Installation After Upgrading from ESX Server 3.0.1 or 3.0.2”. Read about it here. I’d seen this behaviour very early on in my home lab but put it down to my unsupported hardware or something that I did. Because software installations are normally faultless, right? Anyway, follow the instructions and everything’s fine, but I feel sorry for the poor people who launched right in late last year before this issue was identified. 

Another issue to look out for, which you’ll encounter first because you’re doing your VirtualCenter before building your ESX 3.5 environment (normally) is a minor issue relating to the use of the SQL Native Client ODBC Driver. Apparently the SQL Server driver is now longer good enough for VC and SQL 2005. More instructions can be found here – “Upgrades and new installations of VirtualCenter Server With Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database Require SQL Native Client ODBC Driver”. If you’re scratching around for the files, go to the Microsoft site and get them from here.

 They’re minor issues, but no fun when you haven’t seen them before or are trying to look like a pro in front of the customer …