Why upgrade from ESX 2.5.3 to ESX 4?

[MadMaxToronto]

Hello Everybody,

I'm new to VM world and I'm very interested in upgrading our h/w and licence from ESX 2.5.3 to ESX 4. I need to put together a brief document that explains why we should upgrade. I've looked around quite a bit for a document that compares ESX 2.5 with ESX 4 but I've had no luck so far.

Does such a comparison exist?

Thank you,

Max

[sflanders]

The best comparison would probably be night and day. Since ESX 2.5, VMware has adding support to a wide range of hardware and have implemented many features such as fault tolerance. What does your ESX 2.5.3 environment consist of (i.e. hosts, VMs, network, storage, etc)?

[Datto]

Datto's Top Ten Reasons to upgrade from ESX 2.5.3 to ESX 4.0/VSphere:

Off the top of my head here's what I can come up with in 120 seconds

1) Thin Provisioning of virtual disks with GUI management -- shrinks the size of virtual disks -- this could save you considerable SAN dollars and reduce the amount of space that a virtual disk requires

2) NFS and iSCSI shared storage capability in addition to the Fibre storage of ESX 2.5.3 -- NFS and iSCSI is less expensive for lab setups if you're using a lab and many people are using iSCSI and NFS for VM storage

3) VMware HA -- if one ESX host goes down, the other ESX hosts in the cluster get the VMs back up and on-line automatically

4) Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) -- load balances your VM activity across multiple ESX hosts by automatically VMotioning VMs to the least loaded ESX hosts--allows better thruput performance for VMs

5) VCenter Alarms -- many pre-built alarms to allow you to get automatic notice if something bad starts to happen with your virtual environment

6) Fault tolerance capabilty -- one ESX host goes down and all the VMs stay up anyhow without users noticing and without rebooting the VMs. You, the hero.

7) Significant CPU/Memory quantity increases that can be used for VMs and ESX hosts when compared to ESX 2.5.3.

😎 Support for SATA and PATA drives on some motherboards for locating VMs as well as boot drives for ESX (for a more inexpensive lab setup)

9) ESXi 4.0 -- free download, enterprise class reliability, small footprint.

10) No more MUI.

Datto

[mcowger]

Not to mention VERY significant performance improvements, even on identical hardware.

--Matt

VCP, vExpert, Unix Geek

[TomHowarth]

That is making a significant assumption that you are running your 2.5.3 environment on 64 bit hardware :smileygrin:

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Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author for the upcoming book "[VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment|http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780136083214]”. Currently available on roughcuts

[mcowger]

Indeed - I guess i presume that if he is considering upgrading that he checked compatability.

--Matt

VCP, vExpert, Unix Geek

[MadMaxToronto]

Hello Sflanders,

Our current ESX 2.5.3 environment consitst of two IBM xSeries 346 servers with 21 active VM's - all W2K3.

Storage: IBM DS400 (moving over to DS4700 soon)

For ESX 4 I'm planing to deploy it on x3650 servers.

Basically, I'm come up with a compelling list of advantages that ESX 4 has over ESX 2.5.3 to convince the top brass.

Thank you,

Max

[MadMaxToronto]

Great list Datto. Thank you.

Max

[MadMaxToronto]

I did check out the compatibility matrix for ESX 4 and 64bits is the way to go!

Max

[Troy_Clavell]

if nothing else you must also consider support

http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/eos_v_chartsi.html

[sflanders]

I would also add the following:

• 10GB Ethernet support and Jumbo Frames

• VMware Storage VMotion

• VMware Update Manager

• VMware Distributed Power Management

• VMware Guided Consolidation

• Profile management of ESX servers

• Cross-platform virtual networking: Virtual switches may be defined in
  the entire infrastructure rather than in each switch, as was the case
  until now. Networking settings can be applied to the ENTIRE virtual
  infrastructure.