Migrate from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 5.1 :-)

[Almero]

Afteroon team , got tasked to guide a customer with moving this VMs from VI3.5 to vSphere 5.1 .

Any advice would be great , this is my 1st taks at new employer .

Observations >

1. 5.1 HA and DRS has already been built and is ready to go with Full ENT Plus features ( Specifically Distributed Swithes )
2. Uses Fibre Channel Storage on old and new Clusters .
3. I need to confirm old 3.5 LUNs can be Zoned and Mapped to 5.1 Hosts , or things will get very complex as i will need to rely on network transport if not possible ( VMware Converter , SCP , VMKfstools )
4. The target DCs are in two diffirent locations , one being in the same place as the old 3.5 cluster .
5. Need to confirm if vLANs are stretched between two DCs .
6. Can I set a VM to use a Distrubuted vSwitch 5.1 , if its virtual hardware version is from ESX3.5 , so version 4
7. Will ESX5.1 be able to read from Super lagacy VMFS3.31 / 3.21 Datastores , i know in general VMFS 3 is supported , but even this old ? KBs suggest this will work.
8. Will VMs retain thier original MACs thrtough this whole process , considering i am copying VMX files ( they use F5's to point a VMs using MAC adresses )

So here is the base plan >

1. Backup ALL old 3.5 VMs ( dont know yet if its legacy backup type , i assume it is not Vmware enabled backup )
2. Remove ALL snaphosts from old VMs .
3. Record all info with RVtools if support on 3.5  , of make my own powerCLI , specifically grabbing Working directories and file locations , vMAC adresses and so on
4. On a LUN per LUN basis , repeat this procedure

• Power down an enitre Luns VMs
• Remove from inventory
• Unmount from 3.5 ( basically remove the old luns and rescan HBAs )
• Zone/Map this LUN to my new 5.1 Hosts
• Find VMs from RVtools and add to inventory
• Cold Migrate , essentially copy ,  VMs to newly created VMFS5.x Datastores ( cannot really upgrade old vmfs3 due to block sizes and small LUNs )
• Edit Settings per VM to set to new Distrubuted DVPorts/networks ( can this even be done on a virtual hardware 4 VM ) and can you edit Settings on vCenter 5.1 in this format ?
• Power up VMs , and Pray ....
• Login to Guest and update VMware tools interactively for first bunch as test , automated  later .
• Login to Web access so i can control the upgrade of Virtual hardware to 9 ( the on site guys only use old C# client )

From there onward , i can use EG . vSphere replication to split for example CAS and DAG VMs between the two physcial Datacenters and F5 them .

Any inputs please ? Steps i need to add ? Stuff i overlooked ?

[Almero]

Turns out , even connecting the 3.5 Hosts into the 5.1 vCenter is not supported ( InterOP ) , so there goes any type of migrate / vMotion / SvMotion options .

Also the other option being Vmware Coverter simply wont work with 1300 VMs . Too Risky and downtime per VM is a long as the VM is big .

So will test this . PLEASE let me know if there is a better way .

Lets hope a VM with Virtual Hardware 4 can have a DVportgroup bound to it , or else i will have to update VMtools and vHardware before granting it Network access:-( longer downtime per VM

[joshopper]

You might be able to get a trial license of Veeam and backup the machines on the old cluster and restore them to the new cluster. I have not done this between 3.5 and 5.1 but it might be worth testing.