vmotion with 3.01 and 3.5 hosts

[brettcw23]

We have 3 boxes that we would like to use as a cluster. 1 is already at 3.5 and 2 are at 3.0.1 My question is...can I use vmotion between different level hosts? I have a vm on the 3.0.1 host that is used for our wireless authentication and can't be taken down during the work day. So I was hoping to vmtion it to the 3.5 box and then upgrade the 3.0.1 host.

Secondly, if that's not possible, is there another way for me to bring the vm up on the 3.5 host? An outage would be okay if need be. I could move the vm to the 3.5 box and then upgrade the 3.0.1 box at my leisure.

[chandlm]

You should be able to, you might want to search on the forums a bit because there have been some threads about issues/strangeness but I don't think many were anything to stop you from doing it. If I get a few minutes I'll post a few links.

You might want to verify current patch levels before doing this though.

[jpoling · Accepted solution]

You should be able to vmotion between the various versions. . .I ran into some issues with wrong network setting son our vmotion network, but once fixed vmotion worked as expected

Jeff

[brettcw23]

OK, we are checking out the configurations on each box. All 3 are HP DL360 G5's. 2 hosts have 16GB of RAM and one has 8GB of RAM. We're checking the NIC's and HBA's now. My plan is to create a cluster with the 3. Power down what I can, vmotion what I have to and do an in place upgrade. I figure once the cluster is set up, I can alwasy vmotion machines to another host and then completely rebuild the 3.5 host from scratch. I wasn't the original person to build these, so I'd feel better building them clean and configure the partitions and such with correct partitions.

[chandlm]

Don't blame you at all on the rebuilds. As mentioned already just make sure all the labels match where needed so that you can VMotion, etc...

I also tend to rebuild whenever possible since the process is simple and quick for the most part.

[kjb007]

I have hosts of different version in my cluster, just for testing purposes. Just don't update the vmware tools until all of the servers are at the same level.

-KjB