VMware Cloud Community
iforbes
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Legacy 4.1, 5.0, 5.5 migration to 6.5U2

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

Reply
0 Kudos
5 Replies
vmrale
Expert
Expert

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.

Versions of VMFS Datastores

Try with one datastore at a time to reduce potential outage.

Regards
Radek

If you think your question have been answered correctly, please consider marking it as a solution or rewarding me with kudos.
Reply
0 Kudos
iforbes
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

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?

Reply
0 Kudos
daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

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.

Reply
0 Kudos
vmrale
Expert
Expert

Thank You daphnissov​. That's what I was trying to say first. 🙂

Regards
Radek

If you think your question have been answered correctly, please consider marking it as a solution or rewarding me with kudos.
Reply
0 Kudos
iforbes
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

My bad. I understand now. Thanks!

Reply
0 Kudos