We currently have some 4.1 esxi and 5.1 clusters. We usually use the prebuilt "HP customized ESXi images" for building our servers. - Customize VMware ESXi Images for HP ProLiant Servers - I know these images have some drivers in there, and some HP utilities for HP stuff like wbem providers, ilo, etc.
When we go to upgrade our servers we usually remove one from a cluster, and rebuild it from scratch. The problem is we do have multiple clusters and some do not have distributed switches for everything and it would be easier to upgrade to keep the standard switches, etc. When we import the latest 5.1 update 1 ESXi image into Update Manager it will not let us upgrade these old 4.1 esxi hosts because it says it is not compatible because of vendor software or something like that. So my question is, does anyone know of a smooth way to update images that have customized ESXI images? I just worry it will remove the HP utilities. I would look into using host profiles more, but some of our servers have different hardware and the NICs are ordered differently than on others and might not match up with the same vlans, etc.
Thanks,
Dan