delay upgrade of VM's

[garysb]

We are just planning our upgrade from VI3.5 to V4 (don't ask but at last we are getting there....)... to help with the planning it would make life a lot easier if I could migrate the VM's onto the new V4 hosts and plan a separate outage to upgrade the tools and Hardware. Is this a workable scenario running VI3.5 VM's on V4 hosts and if so what is the impact (potential pitfalls) of doing this ?

[Feihong]

You can install a new VC4 and migrate your ESX 3.5 hosts under the new VC4 managment along with your ESX4 hosts. Then if all migration requirements are met, you can vmotion the VMs onto the ESX4 hosts. Here is what you need to check carefully for the compatibility requirements. I assume you use the same host vender and CPU vender for both ESX 3.5 and ESX 4 hosts.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40u1/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm#href=admin/c_migration_with_vmotion...

After VMs are migrated, you can do the rest of processes.

Hope this helps.

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[garysb]

Yes, that's the plan to Vmotion the VM's onto the newly built V4 host. What I want to know is if I can leave the VM's as is after Vmotion and do the Tools update and Hardware update on the VM's at a later date and if so what are the potential pitfalls of not completeing this final upgrade task on the VM's.

Thanks

[asneto]

Yes you can leave the vms running on vsphere 4 hosts and hardware version 4. You only need to upgrade VC before you can upgrade the hosts.

If you don't upgrade the VMS you just won't be able to use new functionality (like paravirtualized iscsi, changed block tracking, etc), but the VMS will work just the same.

Once you are ready to upgrade the vms, ensure you upgrade the tools

first at least on windows guests otherwise you may lose network connectivity.

Here is a document which describes the whole upgrade process: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_upgrade_guide.pdf

[Feihong]

Ok. the main issue that i can think of is the memory management. I am not sure if the version 3.5 tool can still work with ESX 4. Hope others can help on that.




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