A few months back I had a little bit of trouble with an upgrade in our corporate VMware cluster that I thought I would share. The details of this upgrade was to add a new host to the mix and bring everything up to vSphere 4.1 update 1. It seemed pretty straight forward at the time but there were a few unexpected issues that sucked up more time than expected.

So the iron went kaput a few weeks ago and we being the modern american consumers went out and bought a new one. They’re highly disposable and an iron is an iron right? WRONG! We liked our old iron. It worked great and always produced massive amounts of wonderful steam. The replacement, well, let’s just say it has some areas of improvement. The old iron didn’t completely die either. It simply had a lose connection of some sort and wouldn’t stay powered on for the duration of your ironing.

As I wrapped up the migration from vSphere 4.0 to 4.1, I had one host that for the life of me wouldn’t upgrade. It kept giving me the following error: Host cannot download files from VMware vCenter Update Manager patch store.   Check the network connectivity and firewall setup, and check esxupdate logs for details. I can see the ESX host just fine. Nothing out of the ordinary there. The firewall ports look exactly the same as the other 6 hosts in this particular cluster.

I’ve been out of college now for more than a decade and have worked for only a handful of companies. For a lot of people my generation, I’m probably seen as a dinosaur by not changing jobs every year once my stock options were vested. But seeing as I’ve had a chance to move up in companies and produce multiple products, I have a different appreciation for product lifespan and code rot.

How do you come up with a good time estimate? If you are a typical employee, there is a good chance that your job revolves not around day to day mundane tasks. There may be some of that, but there is a good chance that it revolves around completing projects. Yes, project oriented work is challenging and rewarding, but often done very poorly. Not that your work is bad, its the management of the project that we suck at.