Disaster Recovery Scenario - Question

[grey989]

Hello

When our project was scoped to move all 60 of our 3.0.3 hosts to new hardware on ESX 4.1, the project didnt mention that there are two disaster recovery VM's (on standalone luns) that are true copied to an alternate datacenter.

Question: Can a VM be brought back up on the version 3.0.3 host once its been moved to 4.1 (assuming virtual hardware has NOT been updated)

               Our DR Site does not currently have 64 bit capable servers so an upgrade is out of the question at this point, its approx 2000 miles away so its a                not just a quick upgrade process.

               (the process in a disaster would be to split the true copy link between data centers and rescan hba's on the DR hosts for the new lun ID's)

Any help would be appreciated.

[bulletprooffool]

If I remember correctly(I may be wrong here), 3.03 did have version 4 VM hardware? If this is the case, then if your  VMs are are not changed as they move to the new ESX hosts, they should still work. - but 3.03 is out of extended support and has been for some while, so you need to seriously start thinking about upgrading the destination hosts (at least to 3.5u5, if not to 4.1u1)

For peace of mind, you'll want to copy your VM to vSphere, boot it up, then hut it down and duplicate the vmdks etc to your old 3.03 host and test  - but I do not foresee any problems as VMware won;t change the VM unless you instruct it to.

[opbz]

Beleive VMware 3.0 x had HW version 5 but then agiain if he is not updating the HWit should in theory work.. For the benefit of secuiry you might want to copy the VMX files of those 2 VMs in then start them up on the ESX 4.1 servers and see if there are changes.

[DSTAVERT]

Are your DR servers capable of running ESXi 3.5. SInce ESXi 3.5 is still available as a Free download / install I would give that a go. Check the HCL http://vmware.com/go/hcl Since VMs can easily be moved back and forth between 3.5 and 4.x assuming you didn't upgrade the hardware version. 3.x was version 4 hardware.

[idle-jam]

i've used 3.5 to 4 using quest vizioncore backup on the virtual 2 virtual replication. you might want to use this (it might work for version 3.0)