vSphere 5.1 upgrade to vSAN 6.5 Sound-Off

[jgover]

Hi,

Environment:

1. Site running unsupported vSphere 6.5 hardware. (very old hardware)
2. Currently running vSphere 5.1
3. 3 New vSAN Ready Nodes
10GbE switching

What if I do not want to keep any of the vSphere performance metrics and avoid all the incompatibility issues with the current hardware.

I am thinking about creating a brand new 6.5 environment: vCenter 6.5, vSphere 6.5 with vSAN 6.5  and storage migrate the vSphere 5.1 VMs to the new 6.5 environment.

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2013/09/how-to-bootstrap-vcenter-server-onto.html

( I am planning a using a NAS VMFS Datastore on 6.5 to install vCenter 6.5; else I'll try William Lam's link above. )

Is there anything I am missing or gotchas from migrating the VMs over?

Thanks

Jeff

[TheBobkin]

Hello Jeff,

How were you planning on migrating the VMs from 5.1 Environment to 6.5 Environment?

5.1 hosts are incompatible with 6.5 vC so live vMotion is likely not an option here:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php#interop&2=2132&1=

How much capacity does your NAS have and does it have reasonable transfer speeds from/to other storage?

What type of storage is currently attached to the 5.1 cluster environment?

I ask this as it might be best to walk the VMs over:

- Set-up the vSAN and 6.5 vC (either on the NAS or using Lam's technique).

- Attach the NAS (or other storage currently in use) to both environments.

- Storage migrate VMs, few at a time to the NAS (OR leave them where they are if you can attach their current running datastores to the 6.5 vSAN cluster).

- Un-register and Re-register VMs on the vSAN hosts as they become available, power-on, check they are intact.

- Storage migrate the VMs to vSAN datastore and apply Storage Policies to them so they become objects.

- Upgrade VM Hardware Version & VMware tools on all VMs.

So really I think it depends on what you have access to here and how well/fast will transfer and also if you can afford down-time for VMs (should be minimal if shared-storage can be attached to both sides, as just a matter of un-register re-register).

Bob

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[jgover]

Hi,

I forgot to mention the VMs will be shutdown and migrate as we have no choice; we have to take the downtime hit. There are only 20 VMs averaging 150GB disk space. Some Hosts are in a cluster while other are in stand alone ESXi.

So the plan is to not live SVM but to migrate them to the NAS and as you stated below.

So to be sure cold migrate is supported correct?

May also look into Veeam for doing this as well.

Thanks

Jeff

[TheBobkin · Accepted solution]

Hello Jeff,

If you can attach the NAS to both sites (5.1 environment hosts and the 6.5 vSAN cluster) having a shared vCenter is not necessary.

And yes, cold-migrating these VMs to NAS/other datastore and then to vSAN is supported.

I also thought of mentioning that (but was unsure of what you had available), if you have Veeam or something else that can do full-backup and restore, you could pull from the existing cluster and have vSAN datastore as target (but again, this is likely going to be using the same shared-storage as doing it manually).

Bob

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