Methodlogy to upgrade ESX3.5 to ESXi5

[DSRSAS]

Hi,

I am looking for the advantages of upgrading to ESX3.5 to ESXi5 and the method of upgrading it.If anyone can provide any information about it than..it would of great help

[depping]

If you have shared storage why not do a rip and replace? This way you will start from scratch and have the opportunity to make configuration changes if needed, a new install is usually even faster than an upgrade.

Duncan

Yellow-Bricks.com

vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive - eBook | Paper

[golddiggie]

There is no "upgrade" path from ESX to ESXi (any versions)... You'll need to vMotion the VM's to another host (if you have more than one) to keep them running while you install ESXi5 onto the host. I would go to ESXi 4.1u1 right now... If you have a vCenter Server (replaces the older Virtual Center Server) in place once you have hosts on ESXi 4.1u1, then you'll be able to update the vCenter Server to v5 once it's released (and you have the keys and such) and then use VUM to update the hosts as you wish. Upgrading via VUM is far easier on you than doing the old boot from disc method.

The way I see it, the biggest item you'll need to address is the management configuration (getting a vCenter Server online) and then doing the clean install of ESXi on the old ESX hosts...

I would also advise making sure the servers you're using are 64 bit, passing the correct items along from bios. If they don't have 64 bit processors, you'll need to replace the physical boxes.

[jcwuerfl]

Agree with duncan, the best way to do this is when you are able to purchase new hardware (hosts) get ESXi v5 installed, setup, and tested how you want.  Then just use VMware Converter Standalone to move the VM's from the old to the new hardware.  On the new system though, make sure you setup a few test VM's and test everything out before you move any of the old VM's over.  VMware converter is needed to really upgrade the virtual hardware and VMDK files to the new v5 Format.

Thanks

[DSRSAS]

Hi,

I do agree with you. Assuing that I go for new hardware and Install ESXi v4.1 or 5. which ever is available and New Vcenter Server 4.1 or 5 than I how do I bring the 3.5 esx host into New cluster of 4.1.

I am confused at that step. Will the VMware Converter Standalone will convert the machines from old vcenter to new vcenter and will there be any downtime.

[DSRSAS]

Hi

Thanks for the information. Do we go in this order.

1. Vmotion all VMs from few hosts and then format host and install ESXi4.1 u1 or 5.

2. Upgrade or reinstall new Vcenter 4.1 on the new hardware if the old hardware is not 64 Bit.

then how do I move the VMs to new hosts and what happens to the VM hardware version.

Do I make new cluster in New Vcenter?

[kbbsg]

I think especially for large vmware installations; there are some more considerations to do. I recommend going over the new feature list of 4.0/4.1/5.0 and checking which impact they have to your environment. Just to mention some of them: VCB, ESX third vendor agents, vCenter database backend, hardware compatibility, additional tools like vmware view, site recovery etc.

Furthermore make you familiar with the new deployment methods. These could save you a lot of time.

[admin]

ESXi 5 has the ability to upgrade from earlier versions of ESX (classic).  It will attempt to migrate your settings to ESXi as much as possible and will also preserve your VMFS partition along with any virtual machines that you have on it.

You can also do a fresh install of ESXi 5 if you don't want to migrate your settings while at the same time preserving any virtual machines.

[kbbsg]

Thank you Patrick, this are good news.

Will be there a direct upgrade path from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 5.0? Is it correct, that the vCenter Update Manager won't support a direct upgrade?

[admin]

Good question.  I believe for 3.5 you will need to upgrade to ESX 4.x (either 4.0 or 4.1) first and then you can upgrade to ESXi 5.  That method is definitely supported through VUM as well as directly from the CD.

The one caveat to upgrading any older version of ESX is that your VMFS partition needs to be in a certain place on the disk.  If you followed the standard partitioning guidelines in 3.5 you should be fine, however if you ended up with your VMFS partition within the first gigabyte of the disk you will not be able to upgrade or install while preserving the VMFS partition.  This is because the first gigabyte of the drive in ESXi is required for the various system partitions.

[kbbsg]

Using VUM seems not to be the best solution for large scale environments. I guess the upgrade 3.5 -> 4.1 -> 5.0 takes a long time. Maybe it is anyway time to have a look to the new auto deploy feature. I just see one issue which could be a disadvantage of auto deploy. Is it possible to stage just some hosts in a cluster with a new ESXi image for testing purposes? Is there a kind of rule engine available which allows deploying different images to specific hosts?

Thanks for your hint related to the VMFS partition.

Thanks a lot.

[admin]

It does take a while to upgrade all of your hosts using VUM, however the 3.5->4.x->5.0 upgrade process is going to take a while regardless of whether you use VUM or scripted upgrades directly.  The nice thing about VUM is that it works with DRS and should evacuate all of your running virtual machines before taking a host into maintenance mode so you won't have any down time on your guests.  Doing that with the scripted installer is fairly tricky.

As for autodeploy, yes, it has a full rule engine and can do some very nifty things.  You can craft rules based on things like subnets, ip addresses, model names/numbers, asset tags, mac addresses, etc. and have them tied to whatever image you want.