upgrade from 3.5 to 5

[adminlewis1]

Hi,

I have a vmware infrastructure 3.5 on 3 blades connected to a SAN ibm. VmWare is installed on hd onboard.

I want upgrade the 3.5 to 4 and then to 5. One guy has told me that to upgrade to 5 I must format the disk and the SAN then reinstall vmware.

Is that true ?

This could be big problem for me..

Thanks for any answer..

bye

lws

[aravinds3107]

I belive the person should has been talking about the datastore. In vSphere 5, supported datastore version or VMFS3 and VMFS5, you have some benefits if you created new datastore with VMFS5, It is also possible to upgrade the datastore to VMFS5 from VMFS3

vSphere 5.0 Storage Features Part 1 – VMFS-5

VMFS5 FAQ

[dales123]

You main issue with trying to do that is that 3.5 is running ESX and there is no direct upgrade path even if you try to upgrade to 4 and then 5, because 5 is ESXi only you would need to do a fresh install anyway as ESX -ESXi is a incompatible bedfellow. Also you will need to upgrade your vcenter OS presuming that its running 32bit windows (probably 2003) Vcenter for ESXi5 is 64bit only so requires 2008 R2.

Vsphere 4 was the last release to give you a 32bit vcenter choice 4.1 onwards is x64 only. Also its a good idea to check and double check your hardware against the vsphere 5 HCL as things can drop off it as well as be added.