hawkim1
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-04-2008 03:00 PM

VI2 - VI3.5 and New SAN

Hi there,

Hopefully someone out there can help me with this one, to just check what I think my options are:

I have a ESX 2.5.3 environment with 3 ESX hosts all connected to SAN configured with 5 VMFS volumes. We are looking at upgrading to VI3.5, but we are also implementing a new SAN aswell. I understand that dMotion is not support with ESX 2.5.3, so here what I think my options are:

  1. Upgrade the existing implmentation to VI3.5 as an inplace upgrade, then use dMotion to relocate the virtual machines file on VMFS volumes on the new SAN. I suposse the high risk here is that the upgrade breaks something, or something happens to my existing VMFS volumes during the upgrade process.

  2. My second option is to upgrade one of the existing ESX hosts, (or host a new ESX 3.5 host on the SAN) to ESX 3.5, create new VMFS volumes and then use something like Vizioncore vMigrator to upgrade/relocate the virtual machines.

Any help, suggustions or comments would very useful as I'm a little stuck on which way I should go. If option two reducesthe risksassociated to the upgrade, then it will not be a problem to spend the cash!!

Many Thanks in advance

Best Regards

Matt

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nonarKitten
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎02-04-2008 03:38 PM

Option 1 is the best - if a migration is going to break, third-party products have just as high a chance of doing so. vMigrator is quick but not without a tiny bit of downtime, and personally I've had it fail quite a few times - usually somewhere in the middle of merging the snapshots - requiring manual intervention and considerable downtime. Since you have a working SAN, use the built-in migration from 2.5 to VI3.

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