I’ve been doing a few implementations lately, and ran across an old issue that I’d not seen since the early releases of VirtualCenter 2. If you’re silly enough, like I was, to install VC from a zip file, and then have the audacity to use an iso image to perform an upgrade, you’re going to have trouble. The details of this particular little quirk are here, and things haven’t changed much, as I had this problem recently upgrading from VC 2.5 U1 to U2. I’ve dealt with some insane software before (ranking Sun’s Common Array Manager as some of the cludgiest code to install and use that I’ve come across), but I think this particular error is just really silly. I’m not sure it’s even a problem with VMware’s product, or the ineptness of MSI. So, in short, always do your VC installations from one place or another, but don’t do both.

And while I’m at it, if you’re deploying VMware Update Manager in the field, which I think is a commendable thing to do, don’t forget that it’s not delivering VC updates, but is quite happy to provide ESX updates, including point releases. So when VMware recently released ESX 3.5 Update 2, VUM went out and retrieved it. But how many of you thought about upgrading your version of VirtualCenter to Update 2 before remediating the ESX hosts? Well, now you know what we’ve been told since the old days of ESX 2.x / VC 1.x – don’t be trying to run new versions of ESX with old versions of VC.