How would you build out a new blade environment with an existing environment in place?

[theblackknight]

My company has an older blade env. running ESX 3.01 and VC 2.0. We just went out and purchased new HP C class blades and want to start building out a couple of the new blades with ESX 3.5 and them slowly migrate some of our VMs from the old environment to the new blades. Our final plan is to have the new environment built and all the VMs moved to the new blades and then use our old blades as a DR type setup.

Here is what I'm thinking and please chime in if you think it's the right approach or not. Our current VC server is in rough shape and needs to be rebuilt, but not sure if I want to do that before upgrading to VC 2.5?

1) Upgrade current VC server from 2.0 to 2.5 (What are the pros and cons of building a new VC server on different hardware?)

2) Start building a couple of the new blades and add to current cluster environment

3) VMotion some less mission critical VMs to the newly built ESX hosts

4) decomission the older blade once all the VMs are moved off it

Thanks for your help!

[Jasemccarty]

You could stand up a brand new VI3 (VC/ESX) environment (in evaluation mode), and migrate the VM's using VMware Converter, or possibly some type of SAN replication.

Then you have 60 days to get everything moved over.

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

[theblackknight]

Thanks for the suggestion.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

[Jasemccarty]

To be honest, I'm the process of planning a migration from some old 8 way (single core) to some 4 way (quad core) boxes.

I plan on migrating what I can to 5 of the 6 8-way boxes, and then I'm going to add a 4-way to the mix, and so on, until I have 4 4-way quads replacing 2 of the 8-way boxes (keeping my licenses full).

I'm going to P2V my VirtualCenter server beforehand, and then bring my physical VirtualCenter server offline, only to rebuild it.

That's another suggestion. I only suggested a new "farm" was because you said you wanted to 86 your VirtualCenter server, and sometimes it seems easier with a fresh start.

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

[java_cat33]

I think your plan is solid. Ensure you test your new hardware thoroughly before migrating to it. Also make sure you have service console redundancy over your different passthru modules (assuming you are using these - and not blade enclosure switches).