VMware Cloud Community
khallsemco
Contributor
Contributor

4.1 Hosts need Bigger SD Cards. Backup Restore then Replace?

Hello to the VMware Community.

I have gotten a great deal of various ways to do this but I just want to simpliest and safest method.

We have 2 hosts, dell poweredge 910's. Both of them have 2 SD's cards in them, 2 in each host for redundency.

We have 4 new 8 GB cards to put in for a future upgrade.

I just want to take what we have and put it on the exsisting cards without a rebuild. We are an enterprise customer and have a 5.1 vcenter server but we current do nothing with host profiles.

whats the simpliest way to get our current config on the new cards with as little downtime as possible.

I was hoping to pop the new cards in and pretty much be good to go is that a fantasy?

Thank you

Ken

Dell is saying on thing, VMware is saying a rebuild is best, these hosts are part of a major infatructure farm for a critical function so even to get an outtage to do this is nothing short of a miracle.

Can you restore a config to a card using the SD slot in my laptop?

0 Kudos
5 Replies
a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Just a quick question. Since ESXi only requires ~1GB on the SD cards anyway, why would you want to replace the SD cards and cause downtime?

André

0 Kudos
khallsemco
Contributor
Contributor

Per Dell and VMware the default cards in the hosts do not have enough space to perform the upgrade. We want to eventually leverage some of the newer features in 5.1. Possibly even take advantage of HA once the kinks are worked out, this card swap was presented as the first step toward getting to 5.1

0 Kudos
khallsemco
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the help Andre….

0 Kudos
a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Per Dell and VMware the default cards in the hosts do not have enough space to perform the upgrade.

I read it, but I can hardly believe it!? ESXi only creates a few partitions on the SD card which do not exceed the 1GB space I mentioned before. What you need to do when using SD cards, is to configure a "Scratch Location" on "persistent" storage (a VMFS datastore).

see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1033696 for details

André

0 Kudos
khallsemco
Contributor
Contributor

I know, they are only 512 cards in those dell servers.

Sent from my iPhone

0 Kudos