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fafa24
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Upgrade order and hardware question

Dear All,

I'm about to upgrade my VMware environment including View to the latest version

Our environment:

3x ESX 4.1 host (3x Dell Poweredge R710)

1x MD3000i Dell iSCSI for datastore

1x Dell Poweredge R720 new server not yet installed

We  have alreday Vcenter Server 5.0 installed. We use View 5.0 with connection, security and composer VM servers

I'm thinking to upgrade in following order

- upgrade Vcenter Server to 5.0 Update 1

- upgrade View to 5.1

     - connection server

     - composer server

     - security server

     - view Agents

- deploy new server with ESXi 5.0 Update 1

- upgrade the remaining three servers to ESXi 5.0 Update 1

The three server runs in a cluster. Will it be possible to integrate the new server with newer versions to the cluster too? How fast do I need to upgrade the remaining server in order that all servers have the same versions?

I have noticed Vmware removed the MD3000i from the compatibility list. I hope, this won't be a problem. I think that I have read in this forum the Poweredge Server needs a bios upgrade too.

Thank you!

Edy

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eeg3
Commander
Commander

That plan looks fine. You can run mixed clusters (4.x mixed with 5.x) and it is fully supported, as long as you do not upgrade to VMFS-5 or upgrade virtual hardware until you're all the way up to 5.x. I would advise upgrading all to a similar build as soon as you can, though.

Edit: Thought you were upgrading from View 4.x at first, so I removed my initial paragraph. Smiley Happy

Blog: http://blog.eeg3.net
Camek
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Your plan will work.  However, I would suggest you upgrade to ESXi v5 first then do your View infrastructure last.  This way you can make sure to move to VMDK v5 for your storage before you setup View 5.1.

When we upgrade I found this worked much better for us...  We then could make sure ESXi 5 was working well and then when moved View over it could take advantage of our expanded cluster.

As for your new ESXi server I woudl get it installed and setup a new cluster and then as you upgrade your other servers move them into the new cluster,  This way you can move over servers and upgrade VMware tools etc in the new cluster.

eeg3
Commander
Commander

He should be able to move to VMFS-5 datastores live without downtime (though the new 1MB blocksize won't take affect unless the datastores are created fresh), but you're right that virtual hardware 8 would be beneficial, since it's required to use 3D/Aero (and no longer causes problems with Local Mode).

Blog: http://blog.eeg3.net
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fafa24
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thank you very helpful!

We are already on the View 5.0 level. I also need to read about upgrading the datastore not sure how it works.

I don't think that I need to worry that my Dell MD3000i storage was removed from the hardware compatibility list.

Thanks,

Edy

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