vCenter - VH Configurations - Moving from ESX 4.0 to ESXi 4.1.U1

[CamYoung]

Hello Everyone,

Am still new to this VMware stuff, so please excuse my ignorance in many things VMware related.

We are intending to upgrade our Production Clustered ESX 4.0 VH's to ESXi 4.1.U1.

We are not using VMU to perform the upgrade, however have an ISO image that we are using.
We've successfully installed ESXi 4.1.U1 from this image to our Non-Production (unclustered) VH's successfully.

During the installation of ESXi 4.1.U1 on these VH's, I manually configured each with their respective networking and datastore information.

My question is relative to the Production Clustered ESX 4.0 VH's.

Is it possible to use the existing configuration details from the ESX 4.0 VH's and by means of a tool/import process reuse the previous config details in the ESXi 4.1.U1 VH's installation ??

Or will I be needing to manually re-establishing these configuration details again ??

Your thought (and hope the above makes sence).

Cheers,

Cameron Young

[idle-jam]

i would advise you heading over here as it have comprehensive guides and checklist to make you migration painless .. http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/esxi-and-esx/upgrade.html

[AndreTheGiant]

There is no upgrade path from ESX to ESXi... The only way is a host migration.

Clusters can have mixed ESX and ESXi hosts, do you can migrate one host by time.

Hosts profiles my help to host reconfiguration.

Andre

[bulletprooffool]

You can export details and re-import them using a variety of tools.

For cluster config - simply re-use the existing cluster (so HA / DRS / Resource Pools etc)

for your ESX hosts - if you are licensed, you can try Host Profile - which will move most of your config, but will still generate errors as ESX and ESXi are not really identical - so there will be incompatabilities.

The other solution is to use PowerCli to 'backup' your configuration - then do base ESXi installs and 'restore' the config to the new hosts.

It just depends how many hosts you are migrating. If you trawl the web, there are a few sample script sets that people have written for this.

good luck