Vmotion Between ESXi 5.0 & ESXi 5.1

[Asifsshaikh]

Hi Guys,

We are in process to upgrade our environment from ESX/ESXi 4.0/4.1  to ESXi 5.1 U1. But we are having some HP DL380 G5 series server, which vmware says it won't support i.e. service support will not proivde for that. Have checked and found that HP DL380 Rack mounted server can support ESXi 5.0.

Now my question is ,

can we vmotion between 5.0 & 5.1 manually or DRS (Fully automated) ?

what will the the EVC status, do we to enable ?

What are the pors & cons if we do so?

Expecting answer with some reference docs.

Thnx.

Regards,

Asif Shaikh

[jrmunday]

Yes, you can have mixed clusters and migrate guests between hosts without any issues. Since you have mentioned EVC mode, I assume you cant get downtime to do a cold migration? If you can get downtime, then you can simply power the VM off and migrate it between hosts without worrying about EVC compatibility.

Also, don't upgrade your virtual machine hardware version until all your hosts are on 5.1 U1 - this will give you the option of migrating back to an older version if you need to.

What are the pors & cons if we do so?

Pros : Standard set of CPU features supported across all hosts i nthe EVC cluster

Cons : Newer feature sets may not be available as you have masked these out

Message was edited by: jrmunday

[Cyberfed27]

We upgraded our ESXi hosts one by one from 5.0 to 5.1 and during that process we had no issues with vMotion.