Thanks Weinstein. Please help me outline the procedure correctly. I plan to reuse the hostname and the IP. There are three ESX 3.5 hosts sharing vmfs 3.x datastores. For a clean install on one of the hosts, do i enter it into maintenance mode, shut it down once in maintenance mode, and then clean install esxi 5.0? Or, do I remove the host from the cluster first and then shut it down?
Also, during clean install I would choose "overwrite vmfs datastores" since I don't have any local VMs? Once the host is up and network configured I would add it to the cluster that has ESX 3.5 hosts and then rescan the storage (I am assuming even if it is in maintenance mode, taking it out of maintaining mode would require reconnecting the host first, similar to adding host to the cluster)?