Estimate time required to upgrade VM h/w

[mbx369]

Hi,

The time has finally come that I get to upgrade my VI3.5.

I am planning the downtime required for the VMs.

Could someone advise, from your past experience, the amount of time required to upgrade each VM's h/w?

Or what could be used as a baseline for me to estimate?

Appreciate your help.

~~~~~ To Live Is To Die ~~~~~

[brettparlier · Accepted solution]

mbx369,

We upgraded one of our sites from 3.5 to 4 last week. We planned for about 1 hour of downtime, and in the end there was about the same downtime as a reboot. There should be minimal downtime for your VM's, if you are going to be upgrading the current hosts using the same hardware, you can put all of your guests on one host...upgrade the other, then add the VM's into the new hosts inventory. Hope this helps!

[weinstein5]

The downtime for the vm i sthe time it takes to reboot the vm - you can upgrade VMware tools and change the hardware while the vm is running and when you reboot the changes will take effect - if you do not wnat to put all your eggs in one basket you reboot after each change - tools upgrade then upgrade the virtual hardware

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[mbx369]

hi brettparlier,

Thanks for sharing. But just to be sure, this is independant of the VMs' configurations? Like the number of vDisks & vNICs?

I have VMs of different configurations, some even have 12 vDisks. So 1 hour is a safe bet?

~~~~~ To Live Is To Die ~~~~~

[savantsingh]

The reboot after the change should take arround the same time as a normal reboot. Having different virtual hardware wouldn't really a make lot of difference. As said earlier in the posts try and schedule 2 reboots i.e. one for hardware and other for vmware tools.

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[brettparlier]

Correct, this is not reliant on the configuration...I don't think any were identical when I moved them. I am paranoid about it, so I plan for more downtime. The other posts are correct on the reboot time and the number of reboots you may want to do. I gave my customer the hour of downtime to fix any issues that may arise so they wouldn't be there waiting if one did come up. Luckily, I had no issues, but htere is always a chance.

[ejm381]

Just upgraded two hosts from 3.5 to 4U1 last weekend. If I had to do it over again, I would have split up my VM's into smaller groups when using VUM to update the tools. We applied the "Upgrade Tools" baseline to 15 VM's and it struggled mightly...also, false reports of update failures...slow and messy.

The hardware upgrade was the exact opposite, quick and (almost) painless. We ran into the issue detailed below on one of our XP Vm's:

http://ict-freak.nl/2009/06/22/found-new-hardware-wizard-loop

Good Luck

[mbx369]

Hi ejm381,

It just came across my mind, for the vCenter upgrade, I will be upgrading it to a different machine.

Do I need to disconnect the ESXs from the existing vCenter first before shutting the existing vCenter down?

Or can the new vCenter just connect the ESXs? I will be using the same IP & hostname for the new vCenter.

~~~~~ To Live Is To Die ~~~~~

[ejm381]

Sorry, not quite sure about your Q.

I had a fresh Vcenter 4 managing ESX 3.5 hosts. I upgraded the ESX hosts, but nothing needed to be done to Vcenter. Safe is better than sorry, so disconnect the ESX hosts, upgrade Vcenter, upgrade the ESX hosts, and then re-connect them.

Keeping the same ip/hostname for Vcenter...it'll probably work either way.

Good luck.