vMotion from 3.5 to 5.0 and then storage vMotion to VMFS5?

[thomps01]

I have hundreds of ESX 3.5 virtual machines but will shortly be building a new virtual infrasturcture based on vSphere 5 and wish to upgrade them all.

I've seen that I can manage the ESX 3.5 hosts with vCenter 5.0 but I have two specifc questions.

1) If I'm managing my ESX 3.5 host with vCenter 5.0 can I simply vMotion a virtual machine from the 3.5 host to the new 5.0 host (Provided CPU chipset compatability exists)?

2) Once the 3.5 VM is running on an ESXi 5.0 host can I then invoke a storage vMotion from the old VMFS3 LUN to a new VMFS5 LUN?

With the virtual machines running on VMFS5 I would then update thier VMware tools and hardware to the latest versions.

Another approach could be to use VMware Converter to copy the original to the old keeping the orignal in-place for rollback purposes, does this sound like a good idea?

[steffanhr · Accepted solution]

Yes and yes. Just did this a couple of weeks ago in our environment We powered down the VMs before moving them.

[thomps01]

So you performed a cold migration from the 3.5 hosts to the 5.0 hosts and then a seperate storage vMotion.

Once the machines were moved, did you upgrade the virtual hardware and then power up or power them up, upgrade the tools and then the hardware?

Thanks

[steffanhr]

Yepp, cold and seperate storage vmotion. And powerup. We're going to update tools and hw when next scheduled maintenance window comes around But I can't see how this will break anything.. Think I will do tools before I do hw. Do you know whats best practice?

[thomps01]

The best approach is to upgrade the tools and then the hardware. Upgrade Guide Page 137 in the first section mentions this.

Thanks again for your help