Upgrading ESX 2.5.2and Virtual Center 1.4 to ESX 3.0.1 and Virtual Center 2.0

[wallabyfan2]

Hi Community -

Have a project coming up which is involving upgrading ESX 2.5.2 and Virtual Center 1.4 to ESX 3.0.1 and Virtual Center 2.0.

Can I ask for some advice, tips and gotchas and personal experiences out there? Even a small nudge is the right direction please. Just how to approach. What the process should look like?

There are 7 ESX Servers (30+ Guest OSs each) in all to upgrade. The hardware is DELL PowerEdge 6850.

Just looking for some serious advice here. Will provide more details as needed.

The main issue I don't understand at the moment is the VMFS on the SAN will need upgrading from version 2 to 3 so not sure what is required here. The SAN is EMC CLARiiON CX700.

[boydd]

Personally - I prefer a migration to vs. an upgrade. If you have some extra resources such as a couple of servers and SAN space. Migrate your old environment to the new VI3 one.

My $0.02

DB

[wallabyfan2]

OK, planning on a lift and shift upgrade, not in-place Upgrade...so this will be possible.

But where to start in terms of moving a product VM to a new ESX vi3 Server?

[vmrulz · Accepted solution]

Definately go the migration path. We've been working through migrating our farm for sometime and it has been working quite well. A relatively small migration like yours shouldn't be too much of a problem assuming you do have some "headroom" in terms of server/SAN resources. You'll end up managing everything from VC2 (make sure to get all the patches on it!) which is not the best transitionary platform for managing the 2.5x hosts but it works. Go with a remote SQL or Oracle database on a good performing box (especially if you plan to scale up this implementation) for VC as the new version databases a ton of information. Plan for some downtime of guests to move them to the 3.x hosts. Good luck