Xenserver: Upgrade to Xenserver 6.6 (Alpha3) with XenCenter and over NFS ( the no CD upgrade)

Inspired by the Xen Orchestra Team https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/migrate-from-xenserver-6-2-to-6-5/

I wanted to upgrade my hosts to the latest Alpha for testing, but I didn’t want to mess around with burning a DVD and boot off it. Now this solution is not necessary faster than booting off a local DVD depending on network speed and the NFS server, and also that the upgrade is running sequential host by host. However I could kick it off and leave it alone for some while and when I came back it was all done.

NOTE: This is not a strict online Upgrade. If you have HA configured the upgrade will try to move the VMs around to the available hosts before upgrading and rebooting, if not several weird behavior will occur.

What do you need:

From http://xenserver.org/overview-xenserver-open-source-virtualization/prerelease.html

• The XenServer 6.6 Alpha3 ISO (or latest)
• XenCenter Windows Management Console (The latest version belonging to the Xenserver version to be upgraded to)
• Current XenServer patched / Updated to the latest version
• XenServer will re-partition the local disk so you have to remove all local storage VMs to a shared storage.
• A configured NFS Server where you can store the Iso and unpack it to a directory
• Some Windows box with the running and configured XenCenter.

If you need to know how to get to that then I advise to stop right here and use the DVD to upgrade host by host starting with the master manually by booting of the Xenserver DVD.

Open Xencenter and go to “Tools” – “Rolling Pool Upgrade”

Follow the onscreen guide.

Select your Pool

Here you will have to apply a patch for the upgrade.
This patch will only apply when you have the latest XenCenter Windows Version.

Click on both “Apply hotfix” one after another

It should then look a bit like

Now you need to give it you NFS share with the extracted iso of the upgrade.

And the Upgrade starts followed by reboots of the hosts.