Recently I found the need to clone and configure some Windows 2008 Server machines. The version of VMware Infrastructure that was previously installed does not support that particular OS. In fact it still called it “Longhorn”. Time for an upgrade!

I downloaded the newest build (Update 4 as of the time of this post) and did the following steps to ensure a successful upgrade:

• Unpacked the ZIP file downloaded from VMware.
• Backed up my MS SQL database. Our database is housed on a separate machine, but the GUI has a simple backup option. I did a full backup which only took a couple of minutes.
• I did not run the full installer. This looked like it was going to do an install and not an upgrade. I don’t want to have to redo any configuration.
• Ran the VMware-vcserver.exe installer from the vpx directory.
• When this is mostly complete, it will ask to run the database upgrade installer. This update requires some schema changes so I stepped though that as well.
• When it was complete, I ran the Vmware-viclient.exe installer. This will update the actual client software.

When I finished running those couple of installers I was able to fire of VMware Infrastructure Client, login and see that I can now create a new VM from a Win2K8 template.

Of course this is not without a problem, I cannot use that configuration to join the domain- and I don’t have the domain password to do it myself.