How much additional storage does the upgrade from ESX 2.5 to 3.0 take? Just curious. I have a farm that uses 7 TB of storage currently and I need to request the proper amount of storage to be able to do the upgrade. Any info is appreciated.
Thanks
I can't give an exact, but a starting point. You have to remember that all the guest configurations are stored on the VMFS datastores now, so take that in to account.
Here's a real gotcha - if you configured your ESX 2.x datastores to be 1TB or larger, your block size will probably be greater than 8MB. Upgrading such a datastore to VMFS3 is destructive and will erase all your VMDKs. The only way around this is to arange for extra storage on your SAN and then follow the "Upgrading Hosts on a SAN Using VMotion with Datastore
Relocation" method. See page 126 of the VI3 Installation Guide.
We don't have any LUN's that are over 500GB. Just a lot of them. I am pretty much looking for an over all percentage of the additional storage that people have used upgrading their farms.
One thing to note is that with VI3 you need to allow space for a swap file per VM. The swap files that I've seen created are either one half or three quarters the size of the allocated RAM per VM.
i.e. if your VM has 1024MB of RAM allocated to it, a vmdk file of say 10GB, a vmx file of say 300K - then allow for 10GB + (.75 * 1024MB RAM for the vswp file) + another say 1GB for little vmx & vmxf & log files etc.
Remembering that the vmdk (disk files) & vmx (config file) & vswp (swap file) all live together in the same directory on your SAN/MSA etc...