ESX 3.5 Upgrade to VSphere 4, SAN question.

[newbski]

Long time reader and disgester of everyone, first time poster. Thanks for all the info from everyone.

We are running all IBM HS21XM blades. We have all of our VM Datastores on a SAN and the Hosts all have the ESX OS on the local blade HDD. On the upgrade KB: it says on the ESX server Step 5 Note to physically unplug the fiber during the upgrade.

Since we are in a blade chassis that will disconnect all of our ESX Hosts. So that is kind of bad for us during business hours.

My question is by going in to the blade chassis and disabling the port good enough to satisfy this step of the Host upgrade or does the fiber need to be unplugged from the chassis?

Thanks. Mike

[newbski]

By disabling the port I meant the disabling the fiber ports on the physical blade I am wanting to upgrade to vSphere 4 at that time in the fiber switch on the blade chassis.

[KevinMC]

Yes, disabling the port on the blade is the equivalent to unplugging the fiber port from the back.

Kevin

[Sreejesh_D · Accepted solution]

the step 5 is just a safety measure to make sure that the datastores on SAN wont be disturbed during upgrade. Its not mandatory to disconnect\disable SAN LUNs before starting upgrade.

if we compare with 3.5, the upgrade mechanism in 4.0 is different, SAN datastores wont be disturbed in current upgrade method. So far I dint hear any issue saying upgrade disturbed datastores on SAN in 4.0 upgrade.

Regards,

Sreejesh

[newbski]

We updated a couple of weeks ago and no issues in our DR. I didn't disable the fiber ports or anything I just went and did the upgrade through the Update client provided by VM.

Works great. 4 down, 16 to go.