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elihuj
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vMotion + Hardware Upgrade

I read that in the documentation it does recommend vMotioning the VM's off of the host prior to the upgrade. It does not specify however if you are able to vMotion back once the upgrade has completed. For instance, if we put a 4.1 host into maintenance mode and upgrade it to 5.0, are we able to them vMotion VM's from a 4.1 host to a 5.0 host?

Upon completion of the host upgrade, do we also need to upgrade the VM's? When we performed our upgrade from 3.5 to 4.1, one of the steps included upgrading the virtual hardware which required a reboot. Is this also necessary when moving from 4.1 to 5.0? And is a reboot required?

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weinstein5
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Yes you will be able to vmotion back - you can manage ESXi 4 and ESXi 5 hosts with vCenter 5.x

You do not need to do it right away but once all hosts are upgraded to 5.x you shold upgrade the VMs -

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weinstein5
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Yes you will be able to vmotion back - you can manage ESXi 4 and ESXi 5 hosts with vCenter 5.x

You do not need to do it right away but once all hosts are upgraded to 5.x you shold upgrade the VMs -

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful
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elihuj
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Excellent weinstein5, thank you for the reply. The ability to vMotion back was one of our bigger concerns during the upgrade process.

Also, are there ways to automatically upgrade the virtual hardware? During our 3.5 to 4.1 upgrade, we manually upgraded the hardware for every VM which required downtime of at least one reboot. If there's a better/faster way of doing this, it would be very helpful. Thank you again.

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elihuj
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Is there a best practice for upgrading virtual hardware after upgrading the host?

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raog
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You might want to check out this KB:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101067...

Regards

Girish

To Virtualization and beyond! PS::If you felt the answer as helpful, please mark it as helpful/answered so that it helps other users as well! Blog:: www.virtualtipsntricks.com
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SCMHenry
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The VM must be shut down to upgrade the virtual hardware of the VM.

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elihuj
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Thank you for the replies raog, and SCMHenry. It looks like I have some reading to do for upgrading our hardware.

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