Hi. I have a customer that has around 20-30 legacy (out-of-support) 4.1-5.5 ESXi hosts (around 900 vm's). The underlying SAN is iSCSI and running very old storage OS (legacy VNX). The customer cannot upgrade the storage OS to support 6.5U2 (long story). Therefore, upgrading the ESXi hosts is not going to work, as the storage would be unsupported.
Question - The VNX can storage replicate to another VNX (at second site). If the second site is running ESXi 6.5U2 hosts, would it be as simple as replicating the legacy vm's (that reside on the 4.1, 5.0, 5.5 ESXi hosts) from site one to site two, and then mounting the replicated LUNs (datastores) to the ESXi 6.5U2 hosts? Basically, could we facilitate the migration of all legacy vm's to new ESXi 6.5U2 hosts via storage replication only? Once again, there doesn't look like there is an opportunity to upgrade the legacy ESXi hosts due to underlying storage incompatibility.
Thanks
Hi,
it will demand some careful test, but it should be possible, bacause You can use VMFS-3 datastores in ESXi 6.5, but You can't create a new one.
Try with one datastore at a time to reduce potential outage.
Hi. I'm not sure i'm following. Why would I create a VMFS-3 datastore for the ESXi 6.5 hosts. I'm wondering if I can simply use storage replication to replicate the legacy vm's to the second site. Once at the second site, could I simply mount the replicated LUNs to the ESXi 6.5 hosts?
To answer your question, that should work. I think the previous poster was attempting to say that this will be replicating the entire VMFS-3 datastore including its metadata. So you'll need to be licensed and be prepared to perform (with adequate capacity on the back-end storage) a storage vMotion from that replicated LUN to a new VMFS-5 datastore to fully remove the vestiges of a bygone era.
Thank You daphnissov. That's what I was trying to say first. 🙂
My bad. I understand now. Thanks!