Virtual Hardware/VM Compatibility upgrade issues

[Alfredj1204]

Hi all,

we are about to upgrade the virtual hardware (VM compatibility) on 800 VMs from version 7 to 9 on our vSphere 5.1 environment. I have read about issues with hidden network cards when the card is moved to a different position on the virtual PCI bus during the upgrade. I have tested the virtual hardware upgrade with several VMs but none of them showed this behaviour.

I know how to fix the problem but now I am looking for real world experiences.

1. What percentage can I expect to fail?
2. Are there any usefull tips, tools or scripts to ease the process of finding and fixing failed VMs?
3. What is causing a card to move a position on the virtual PCI bus (can I "predict" which VMs will have a hidden network card, e.g. a combination of a specific operating system and certain type of pci device)?

Regards,

Alfredj.

[nkrishnan]

I m not sure about the problem that mentioned. But I could successfully upgrade the Virtual machine hardware from 7 to 9 without any problem. I have used 2 mentioned update manager and right click on Virtual machine.

Also you can have critical Virtual machines snapshot before upgrade as back up.

[Alfredj1204]

Thank you fo your response, it is good to read you had no problems. To get a better pciture, how many VMs did you upgrade and what operating systems are you running in your VMs?

[nkrishnan]

I had ~6 Virtual machines mix of Redhat 5.4 and windows 2008R2

[Gortee]

Evening Alfredj,

It can always be dangerous making these type of changes.  I just finished the upgrade from 7, 8 to 9 on 5 clusters about 900 Virtual machines.  Of those I did not have a single issue with the upgrades.  Please don't take this is a go ahead.  Please snapshot critical virtual machines before you make the change.  The issue you mentioned was an issue with vsphere 5.1 please make sure you have installed the latest update 5.1b and you should be ok and not run into the phanom nic issue.  If you do run into the phanom nic issue you can solve it by moving the nic to another port group and back.  This can be scripted. 

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

[Alfredj1204 · Accepted solution]

Last week we upgraded the virtual hardware of 500 VMs form hardware version 7 to 9 (vmx-09). Overall it went smoothly, except for some Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers. We experienced an issue that is described in an article named "Windows 2003 virtual machine loses access to the locally stored profile after upgrading the hardware version (2009762)":

"After upgrading a Windows 2003 virtual machine to hardware version 8, you may experience these symptoms:

• You lose access to locally stored profile.
• Attempting to log on fails with error: 
• Windows cannot find the locally stored profile: Insufficient security rights or a corrupted local file. Windows has logged you in with a temporary profile any setting you make will not be saved."

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=200976...

A power down of the VM and setting the video card memory to 4MB in "Edit Settings" of the VM did solve the issue for all VMs (see article).

Thank you all for contributing to this topic.

Regards,

Alfredj

[Gortee]

Alfredj,

I am glad it went mostly smoothly and thanks for updating the article with the results and issue you ran into so others can learn from it.

Have a good one.