Upgrade VirtualCenter 2.5U3 to vCenter 4.0U1 on New Hardware

[chris_delaney]

Dear All,

I currently have VirtualCenter 2.5U3 (pointing at a remote database) running on older hardware which won't be sufficient to do an in-place upgrade to vCenter 4.0U1. I'm planning, therefore, to move to vCenter 4.0U1 on some new (64-bit) hardware

running Windows 2008 Standard R2 x64.

Someone has told me that the best way to do this would be to install VirtualCenter 2.5U3 on the new hardware and then, once I'm sure that's working correctly, do an in-place upgrade to vCenter 4.0U1. The only problem is that the compatibilty matrix says that I can't install VirtualCenter 2.5U3 on Windows 2008 at all, let alone the x64 version.

Has anyone attempted this kind of move and, if so, have there been any issues? If not then can anyone think of a way I can do this upgrade without too much risk?

Many thanks.

Chris

[jkumhar75]

The best possible way to upgrade your virtual center to do a clean install of VC 4.0 on the new hardware with new database and configure the licensing and all.

Then you can take a backup of your old database and perform the restore of the database on the new database.

In this way you will be able to test functionality and resolve if any issues without affecting the production.

Jay

MCSE,VCP 310,VCP 410

Consider awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

[chris_delaney]

Surely though, the restored database will still be at VirtualCenter 2.5U3 won't it? I was under the impression that the upgrade to vCenter 4.0U1 would alter the database fairly substantially and doing a restore of the 2.5U3 database wouldn't address that would it?

Many thanks.

Chris

[chris_delaney]

Perhaps there's another way... Does the vCenter installer do a proper hardware check to see if the machine has two actual CPUs? The machine I'm running VirtualCenter 2.5U3 on has a single Xeon with hyperthreading - will that be sufficient?

If so then I could probably install vCenter 4.0U1 on the existing machine then migrate to the new hardware afterwards without the risk of losing the database.

What do people think?

Cheers.

Chris

[jkumhar75]

It seems you have missed my point.

• The new virtualcenter will have a different hostname, ip address and new database with different name.I need you to restore that old database on to this new one to just preserve the database record offline.In this way there won't be any effect to production.Later on you can offline the old database and use this new one virtual center with the new database.

• Regarding your another quesry about the hardware, it's always recommended to go for the system which will give you maximum performance under the heavy utilization.

Jay

VCP 310,VCP 410,MCSE

Consider awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

[HughBorg707]

I don't recall it failing to install if you don't have 2 CPUs.

What I would consider is doing a P2V of your vCenter and try your upgrade on the isolated VM. If that works you're good to go.

Also it sounds like you're used to having your vCenter on its own box. That works fine but also consider running it as a VM if you have the resources. It makes it easier to do maintenance on later.

Regards

Hugh

http://www.1zero1.net

[chris_delaney]

Hi Jay,

Sorry - I probably needed to emphasise that I want to keep my existing data. If I create a new database instance for vCenter 4.0U1 then I will not be able to use the old database to restore because it will still be at VirtualCenter 2.5U3. Unless, of course, I just do an in-place upgrade with my existing hardware (as suggested in a post above) which will then upgrade the (remote) database. Once that's done I'll be able to do as you suggest which is to take a backup of the (newly upgraded) database and have it as a backup in case anything goes wrong when I move to the instance of vCenter on the new hardware.

Thanks both for your input - I'll try doing the in-place upgrade and then migrate to the new hardware.

Cheers.

Chris