Replace all drives in server (6.5), best way to back up and restore VMs/Config ?

[DavidinCT]

Hi,

I'll try to keep this short and sweet. My VM server is a DL380 G7 running Esx 6.5  with 4 VMs (2008r2), System is powerful enough for what we are doing so it's no need to upgrade.  The biggest issue is storage.  The system is filled with 146gb drives and it's just too little in a RAID config, so will be gutting them and putting in new 600gb drives.

The system is currently running 6.5.0 Update 2 (Build 11925212) and would upgrade to 6.7 but, it appears the very capable dual Intel X5675 CPUS are not compatible.  So I need to stick with 6.5. This server is NOT connected to a vCenter server, it's a stand alone one.

SO the goal is to backup the whole config and nuke drives, then install new drives, reinstall 6.5 then put VMs back.  Normally on a single VM, I would do a back of the server, delete the VM and recreate the config, and restore the VM.  This whole process takes many hours...

IS there a well documented method backing up ESX's config, pull the physical VMs off the system to do what I want a little quicker and a little more accurate ?  I am not a Linux command expert but, can understand.

What is the best way to do what I am looking to do here ?

Just looking through some thoughts here

Thanks in advance.

-Dave

[jatinjsk]

Hello David,

I have dealt with stand alone ESXi hosts and trust me maintinance is a big challenge though.

However in your scenerio good thing is that you do not need to back up everything.

As you are replacing HDD from one to another and you have RAID configured. In this case what i have done in past is to replace one disk at a time and wait for RAID to do all the rebuilding work. This needs to be done very carefully. There should not be any -

     -power intruption

     -any existing faliures on hardware should be remediate first.

     -Most important to ensure health of HP Smart array controller health.

In my case i had RAID-5 with 4 disks and replaced all 4 disk one by one without loosing any data. Key is to monitor RAID building process from HP iLO and wait for rebuilding to complete for recently replaced disks..