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Gavis4569
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

vSphere Essentials mixed with Eval version?

Hi,

One customer asked for an infrastructure audit. They are running standard vSphere Essentials Plus kit on Dell VRTX system (SME version of a blade chassis, up to 4 physical hosts, DAS shared storage).

There are many misconfigurations in the environment (no shared storage configured resulting in no vMotion or HA). As a result, the whole infrastructure needs to be architecture.

There is no problem with that, did that many times in different environments. The question is, how to move the data from local storage (actually configured) to newly created shared storage. It is possible to do a full backup & restore using Veeam, but I was thinking about something less invasive.

Storage vMotion should do the trick, but Storage vMotion is not available in Essential Plus kit.

Is it possible to temporarily switch ESXi hypervisor in Evaluation mode (and still be managed by vCenter Server for Essentials)? The Storage vMotion is a licensed feature of the ESXi thus Eval version will cover that, but I am not sure if it will be supported by vCenter Server for Essentials (but should be OK, there is no such license feature regarding storage vMotion on the VC server itself).

I am a bit lazy to simulate such environment in my LAB, and it would be great if somebody tried that before (if not, I will do that in my LAB and post results).

Thanks!

Martin Gavanda https://martingavanda.com https://learnvmware.online
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3 Replies
IRIX201110141
Champion
Champion

You can migrate VMs from one DS to another DS when aVM is shutdown.

Why not assign every Blade to every exising Virtual Disk (of the Perc8 of course)  and you have shared storage and HA and vMotion will be working as expected.

If a ESXi runs more than 60 days its not possible to switch back into eval mode.  If you perform a major release upgrade like going from 5 to 6 the host will goes into eval because you need new licenses.

Regards,

Joerg

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Gavis4569
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for the answer.

I can shut-down the VMs but I would like to avoid any downtime at all (or minimize it as much as possible)

Existing VDs on Perc8 will be deleted and recreated from scratch (several RAID5 volumes unified into single one, RAID0 for transaction logs of MSSQL and other lovely things)

Martin Gavanda https://martingavanda.com https://learnvmware.online
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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Unless I'm mistaken, the Essentials Plus edition (v5.5 and newer) supports changing both host, and storage from the Migration wizard in the vSphere Web Client. With a vMotion network in place, this can be done online, even without shared storage.

André

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