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roblmc
Contributor
Contributor
‎07-23-2013 01:41 PM

Will this Upgrade Plan work? ESXi4.1 to ESXi5.1 upgrade + one Datastore Disk Upgrade

Background:

Dell T710 Server, 96GB memory  (using 40GB now).  Standard ESXi4.1 and 11 VM's.  10 of the VM's are Windows 2003 and one is SCO Unix. Two RAID Arrays using VMFS 3.46.  One array is Raid 10 (6x100GB) = 300GB and one array is Raid5 (8x300GB) = 2TB.  Each array is a different Datastore.   There are 9 VM's on the 2TB Datastore and 2 VM's on the 300GB Datastore.

Goal: I want to upgrade to ESXi5.1 first.  Then I want to replace the 6x100GB disks in the 300GB Datastore with 6x512GB disks.

Planned Steps for VMware Upgrade:

  1. Put in Maintenance Mode
  2. Shutdown all VM's
  3. Backup all VM's.  I can do disk to disk backups over to other 4.x Datastores on other Servers using our VMX software tool
  4. Use ESXi 5.1 Upgrade CD
  5. Upgrade ESXi, preserve VMFS Datastore
  6. Review Upgrade Logs and resolve any issues
  7. Enter upgraded license keys I've generated for 5.1
  8. Upgrade VMware tools on 9 of the VM's using UI.
  9. Upgrade the 2TB Datastore to VMFS5 from 3.46
  10. Power up only the 9 VM's on the 2TB Datastore and validate.

Planned Steps for Disk Upgrade

Recall that there are only 2 VM's that are on the Datastore with 6x100GB disks.  I already have backups of them from the previous step.

  1. Shutdown all VM's currently up (should be 9)
  2. Delete Datastore on the 6x100GB disks
  3. Shutdown VMware
  4. Shutdown Server
  5. Pull 6x100GB disks and label with sequence
  6. Insert 6x512GB disks
  7. Power up and use Dell Tools to ensure 6 new disks are recognized and configured as RAID 10.
  8. Power up VMware
  9. Create new Datastore on 6x512GB disks.  Should be VMFS5 version.
  10. Restore VMBackups for two VM's that were on the 6x100GB disks
  11. Upgrade VMware tools on 2 VM's
  12. Power up other 9 VM's and validate

I'm assuming that the VMware is installed on the 2TB Datastore but not sure how to verify....

Any recommendations or changes?

Thanks in advance!

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6 Replies
weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal
‎07-23-2013 01:51 PM

Have you reviewed the upgrade guide -  http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-511-upgrad...

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful
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roblmc
Contributor
Contributor
‎07-23-2013 02:49 PM

Yes I have!

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memaad
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎07-23-2013 04:06 PM

Hi,

Your Plan looks GOOD. Only thing is how GOOD is your backup. Is there any way to check  consistency of your back, then do it. In short, everything about your BACKUP.

Regards

MOhammed

Mohammed | Mark it as helpful or correct if my suggestion is useful.
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OscarDavey
Hot Shot
Hot Shot
‎11-12-2013 02:21 PM

You don't need to bring down the VMware platform to upgrade the hard drives as you have them running on the second 2Tb array.  You can swap out the drives and then rescan the adapters in vCenter to see the new drive space.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal
‎11-16-2013 09:48 AM

yes you can upgrade ESX 4.1 to 5.1, there is no issue in doing that.

You have to move all the VMs from one host to another hos and make the host free before upgrade.

for upgrade the hard disk in data store you have to do storage vmotion and move all the VMs to another storage node and make the Storage Node free.

you can do the Storage Maintenance and use that storage and datastore again.

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