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bigK2009
Contributor
Contributor

Moving Datastores to new servers

We are currently planning a migration to Vpshere from ESX 3.5. For a variety of reasons we are moving to all new vphere servers and a new virtual center server. The plan right now is to install vphsere on new servers, connect new servers to the new virtual center and configur HA, DRS, etc....

My question is can we just expose the LUNs that the 3.5 servers are using to the vphere servers in order to move the datastores to the new servers? Would it be just a matter of adding the VMs to inventory at that point on the vphere servers? After all VMs are on vphere then we planned to decommission the old servers. Anything else that we might be missing.

I've read the upgrade guide that lists the different upgrade scenarios, but didn't see one that was like this.

Thanks in advance.

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mouradb
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

yes the scenario you just described will be an easy task without any

downtime I guess if you Import/migrate all the VMs/Datastore to the new vSphere

environment if your hardware is compatible of course,

do not forget to update the VMware tools as well at the end.

better try this on a test server and have all the Issue (if any) corrected.

good luck!!

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bigK2009
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Do you know if the vsphere servers would pick up the datastore names or would we have to add them like they are new storage?

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mouradb
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Are these NAS, SAN or iSCSI Datastore? simple job as you have done it with the first esx3.x version of ESX, I guess these will be new storage for your new vSphere.

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bigK2009
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They are all SAN datastores

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mouradb
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Dude, here's what I would do. Keeping your old and new servers online until you are done.

1. Upgrade your virtual center to 4.0

2. Install ESX 4 onto your new hardware and attach them to your 4.0 virtual center.

3. Attach your LUN's to the new ESX 4 servers

4. Migrate your virtual center to the new ESX 4 servers

5. Migrate any other VM's to your new ESX 4 servers

6. Upgrade VMware tools on all the VM's

7. Upgrade the virtual hardware on all the VM's

No upgrades have been done to VMFS, so you don't need to worry about

that. When you're doing your install on your new servers, I would make

sure your SAN is not connected to them to limit the chance of

distroying your datastore.

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bigK2009
Contributor
Contributor

That would be a good option as well. I did consider this and still might do it. I appreciate all the help/advice.

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