I am aware of the many ways to upgrade ESXi. The CD installation media, the vcli and the update manager. I elected to use the installation media on an older Dell PE 2900 test box we have before I do the production boxes.
I downloadede the most recent verison of ESXi VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.1.0-799733.x86_64.iso and burned it to a CDROM. I booted the server to it. I very carefully chose UPGRADE and started to do the installation. The installation stopped at 24% and I waited a few hours without any activity on the server HDDs lights or the CDROMS. I hit the ENTER key a few times and the server rebooted. It went back to 5.0 ESXi.
I have attempted to restart the installation and it NEVER gives me the option to UPGRADE, it acts like it's doing a full install, even to the point that it issues a warning that the HDD will be reparittioned.
I REdownloaded and reburned the ISO and get the same results with it.
What am I doing wrong? Why is the UPGRADE option failing to reappear? It sees the 2 RAID arrays, the partitions on them and even warns me that the partition I am choosing has a VMFS storge partition on it and I can tell it to preserve it. The Hypervisor appears to run OK at 5.0, I can boot to it and launch VMs. This particular box is running the free version of ESXi as we have the 2 produciton boxes using the licensed versions at this site. I DO realize ESXi Free comes with NO SUPPORT but would appreciate any helpful advice you can extend to me.