Upgrading local hard disks in ESXi

[theaoh]

Hi,

I have a DL380 I am about to install ESXi 5 (with no VCentre) on and I am planning to install to USB flash drive and use the local disks for the VMFS store. One of the main reasons for this is that in the future I will likely upgrade the local hard disks to something bigger at which time I may also need to reconfigure the RAID array.

What I am hoping is that if I install ESXi onto USB flash, when I do need to upgrade the disks I will just have to following the following steps:

- Remove the VM guests from the local host inventory

- Copy the VM guests to an external storage temporarily

- Shutdown the server, replace the disks and reconfigure the RAID array

- Reboot the server and configure a new datastore on the upgraded hard disks

- Copy the VM guests back to the new datastore

- Add the VM guests back to the local inventory

As the ESXi install will be on USB, I presume replacing the disks will not harm it and it will not need to be reinstalled. Can anyone confirm if my understanding above is correct and a disk upgrade on a flash based ESXi server can be done following these steps?

Thanks

[jrmunday]

This plan seems perfectly reasonable to me. Cheers, Jon.

[theaoh]

Thanks very the response.

[admin]

While moving the VMs to external storage, we would recommend you to convert the VM into an ovf to avoid any corruption. The reason I meant corruption here since you are moving VM files from a VMFS to a different file system.