Not enough room for vSphere 5 Upgrade? Free some up!

While using VMware’s Update Manager to upgrade a 4.0 ESX host to vSphere 5, I ran into a space issue.  Looking at the event tab on the ESX host in question, the error stated that at least 297 MB free space was required for the upgrade.

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A quick putty session to verify the actual free space on the host and I noticed the following suspicious esx3 folders taking up a considerable amount of space.  These folders were remnants left over from the ESX3 to 4 upgrade.  The folders were there to allow for a roll back.  They were never cleaned out and were preventing my upgrade now.

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Fortunately, VMware has a nifty little command called cleanup-esx3 which when run will clear out these unnecessary files.  Once removed, you can no longer roll back to ESX3.  Most likely not an issue. Winking smile 

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After a quick reboot, the folders and mount points are removed from the system.

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You can also remove the folders manually.  Once the necessary space was freed up, rerunning the Update Manager task did it’s thing.

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