ESX 3.5 to ESX 5 Upgrade.

[biggieinternati]

HI ALL.

I ahve a project coming up to upgrade my current ESX 3.5 environment to vSphere 5. both environments will be up at the same time ( new hardware etc). If possible i cant ahve any down time.

Current Environment:

2 ESX 3,5 Hosts

Fiber Channel Storage, EMC CX4-120

about 25 VM's (including Exchange 2003, DC's and 3 SQL servers)

New Environment

2 ESXi5 hosts

vSphere 5 Enterprise License

iSCSI Storage, EMX VNX

backup with Datadomain and Networker.

As i mentioned before, the new environment will be built along side the old one, so i need to HOT migrate the guests over.

Whats the best way to do this? can i add the old hosts to the iSCSI network and vStorage Motion (is it even possible on 3.5, also should i be concerned about moving Exchange 2003 and SQL like this)

is my only alternative p2v. if i am P2Ving should i do a cold migration of exchange and the SQl servers.

if possible i would like to uitilise VMFS5 and the unified 1 mb block size.

I am also planning on using the vCenter Virtual appliace. whats the down side to using this with 2 hosts for a SMB.

thanks in advance!!!

[JedwardsUSVA · Accepted solution]

While there are many ways of doing this, here is the method I personally prefer as it doesn't require using converter.

1. Point your new vCenter 5 instance to the 3.5 licensing.  Go to Administration>vCenter Server Settings.  Under Licensing>License Server, enter the name of your 3.5 vCenter server.  Should look something like 27000@myoldvcenter.mydomain.com
   
2. Configure your old LUNs and vSwitches on the new ESX hosts
   
3. In the old VIC, remove your ESX 3.5 hosts from any clusters then disconnect them from the 3.5 vCenter.
   
4. Add the old ESX hosts to the new VCenter
   
5. VMotion your VMs to the new ESX hosts.  At this point your are still left with old 3.5 VMs and VMFS.
   
6. Next steps will require brief downtime depending upon the size of your VMDKs.  Do a "hardware upgrade" on the VMs and reboot them
   
7. VMOTION Storage to new LUNs with new VMFS
   
8. Done!
   

Gotcha's to watch for while migrating:

• New MAC Addresses (if you use converter or other methods)
  
• When VMotion as described above, you may have to edit each VM to update the network settings especially if you are moving to a distributed switch
  
• If your ESX 3.5 hosts are unstable and/or you don't remove them from your old clusters prior to disconnecting them, they may crash
  

[TBKing]

One note to the above steps:  Upgrade the VMTools before upgrading the VMHardware.

[nikheelkumar16]

Hii,

I would suggest you to upgrade old servers using vCenter Update Manger,

it is very easy to upgrade with a min downtime.

You can follow this process upgrade your vCenter server to 5.x --> followed by update manager (same version for that of vCenter) --> vSphere client             -->VMtools &VmHardware upgrade --> and lastly ESXi Hosts

Be sure to backup the vCenter & Update Manager Database. And in case you're running 32-bit windows, you will need to upgrade to 64-bit OS for installing vCenter 5. I suggest you to go through the below whitepaper atleast once prior starting the upgrade

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-50-Upgrade-Best-Practices-Technical-White-P...

For upgrading using VUM, check out this link.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/upgrade.html

and this article might help you.

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1785-vSphere-5-video-Migrating-from-ESX-4.1-to-ESXi-5.0.html.

[biggieinternati]

Thanks for your help guys!!!.

Are there any instruction avaliable for adding the old VIC to the licensing section on the new vCenter. Any gotcha's?

Thanks again!

[JedwardsUSVA]

No it just allows you to add those servers to VCenter.  They just have to be removed from the old one.