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spanker
Contributor
Contributor

3.5 datastore presented to ESXi5

I have a number of guests on a 3.5 farm that i need to get into our 5 farm.  Each has their own datastores on the same SAN.  The discussion from the team is to down the guests of each datatstore on 3.5, have our storage team present the LUN to the servers in the 5 farm, add the datastore from 3.5 to 5, add the guests to the 5 inventory, power up, upgrade tools, then upgrade the virtual hardware.

Its simplified for the discussion but can you seen some issues to be aware of?

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DavoudTeimouri
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

ESXi 5.x can work with VMFS3 but I recommend, add a temp LUN to your hosts and move virtual machines of a old LUN to that, then delete the old LUN and re-create that.

Because, there is an option for upgrading VMFS3 to VMFS5 in place but VMFS block size will not be changed during this upgrade.

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spanker
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks,

Im a bit confused by the recommendation though.

"ESXi 5.x can work with VMFS3 but I recommend, add a temp LUN to your hosts and move virtual machines of a old LUN to that, then delete the old LUN and re-create that.

Because, there is an option for upgrading VMFS3 to VMFS5 in place but VMFS block size will not be changed during this upgrade."

So, create a new LUN but dont make it a datastore?

Move guests to it, delete old one...and recreate..where?

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iiToby
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Spanker,

The recommendation is to move your VMs off your old VMFS3 Datastores to a VMFS5 Datastore, if you have some extra space create this as a "staging" VMFS5 Datastore and put your VMs there. Once you have moved all your VMs out of the VMFS3 Datastores Delete the Datastore and format the LUN with VMFS5. While you can do a in place upgrade of VMFS3-to-VMFS5 it does not change the block size and ultimately affects performance.

So in order

  1. Create a New LUN for VMFS5 Volume as "Swing Space"
  2. Format LUN with VMFS5 and make new Datastore
  3. Storage vMotion VMs to new Datastore
  4. Once old datastore is confirmed empty
  5. Format Old Datastore with VMFS5
  6. Storage vMotion VMs Back to Old Datastore which is now VMFS5
  7. Repeat with all remaining datastores

Kind Regards

@iiToby

spanker
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, I am testing all this out next week with non production datastores & server.

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