Upgrade/Migrate from ESX 3.5 to 4.1

[terstegen]

We are looking to upgrade/migrate our current environment from ESX 3.5 to 4.1.

Here is my current setup:

4 HP Blades in cluster running esx 3.5 enterprise.

HP/Lefthand iSCSI storage

33 virtual machines

We are going to be buying 8 new blades which will be installed into a new blade enclosure

Buying vspere enterprise plus

Attached to the same storage

Need to move the current 33 vm to the new hardware (hosts).

We are also going to reuse the current blades in a DR location so we going to upgrade those to vsphere ent plus.  we are also buying SRM for 25 vm.

when these blades get moved to the DR location they will be getting new storage

My very basic upgrade path is as follows:

Install vsphere on new hardware.

Attach new hardware to my san

make new cluster in datacenter

move vm to new cluster

     is this done with vmotion or converter or another way?  I would like to minimize downtime and migration time

disable san access for old hosts

upgrade current hosts to vpshere

move to dr location

attach DR san

install setup SRM

Any other thoughts?  Any good documentation for this scenario?

Thanks.

Tyler

[DSTAVERT]

Have you looked at the upgrade guide http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_upgrade_guide.pdf

Or SRM documentation http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html

[nkrishnan]

First you have to upgrade or install vCenter 4.1 server f

>     is this done with vmotion or converter or another way?  I would like to minimize downtime and migration time

> disable san access for old hosts

You have to check the CPU compactibility to make sure that VMotion will be successed, also you have explore is it support EVC. Otherwise you have to use converter for online migration. But it will be little slow process comparitively. Otherwise after getting the SAN environment is shared between old and new servers, poweroff the VM and migrate it.

Once you have migrated it, upgrade the ESX servers to 4.1

[ab_lal]

Looks like a good plan...

Firstly if you adding the new ESX Hosts with 4.1 and providing it access to the same storage, it would easier for you to migrate/clone them to new ESX 4.1

If it is possible to provide access to the old VM Network then there will be no change of IP address.

This would ensure low downtime.

Once migration is completed, you would have to upgrade the VMtools first and then shutdown the VM and upgrade VM hardware.

Cloning of VM: We would clone VM's just to ensure that the VM works fine after migration and tools upgrade.

Once all the VM's are moved over to new ESX 4.1, you can remove the old Hardware and create a fresh Cluster for DR.

[terstegen]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Does anyone know if Intel Xeon Processors X5365 will support vmotion to a host with X5650 Xeon?  The hosts that are running the blades with the X5365 processors are running ESX prior to update 2 so EVC is not an option?

When I look at the following website:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1991

It looks like my X5365 are in group B and the X5650 are in group E so it would not be supported even with a CPU mask (I am looking at the Intel Core CPUs chart)...

Thanks.

Tyler