Migration from 4.0 to new 5.x system.

[Speculator]

Hi all,

I'm staring to think about my planning for a migration from our current v4.0 system to a 5.1/5.5 setup on new metal.  I'm getting my head around most of the process easily, but I was wondering about what my best approach to migrating my VM's from one infrastructure to another would be.

I've had multiple suggestions from multiple knowledgeable parties.  The guys from Dell Storage who're peripherally involved were suggesting my best way to move the VM's was to backup and restore, and one other person suggested using the import functionality in the vSphere Client.  Both sound like a way to complicate the issue.  Both the new system and the old system will have access to the same SAN storage, so what I'd like to know is can I simply power down a VM and remove it from the inventory on the v4.0 system, then browse the datastore on the v5.x system and add the VM to the inventory there (if the 5.x system is configured the same as the 4.0 system)?  Or am I just being hopeful in thinking it might be that simple?

Thanks.

[a_p_]

What you described is certainly possible if the old storage system is supported by the new ESXi version. Anyway, to find out which other options are available, it would be helpful to know which licenses you have and whether you want to create new VMFS5 datastores on the new storage system rather than to upgrading VMFS3 to VMFS5.

André

[Speculator]

Hi,

Thanks for the input, knowing it's possible is the first step!  We're licensed with a VMWare VSphere Academic Standard license for 6 sockets.  We have two storage appliances, one is an old HP MSA, which isn't v5 compatible and a newer Dell Equallogic which is compatible, so the VM's will have to be migrated to the Dell storage before being shut down and removed from the v4 system and brought back up on the v5 system.  Then I imagine once the VM's in each volume are migrated, the storage volumes can be upgraded to v5.  Is there any advantage to starting with new VMFS5 volumes instead of upgrading VMFS3 volumes?

Thanks.

[ch1ta]

Assuming that you're using paid version of ESX(i) hosts, you can utilize free utility called Quick Migration provided in free product version. With this tool, you can migrate one or more VMs without any issues between ESX(i) hosts, datastores or both.

Based on my experience, all you need to do in order to migrate VMs is to add both hosts to backup console, select required VMs and migrate them.

Cheers.

[a_p_]

It's actually up to you whether to upgrade the VMFS version or use new datastores. There are a few differences between a new and an upgrades file system (see http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/07/new-vsphere-50-storage-features-part-1-vmfs-5.html) which however may not be really relevant depending on your environment. With the migrations I did lately, I added the old hosts to the new vCenter Server environment and presented a "transfer" LUN with a VMFS3 datastore to these old hosts. Then I migrated the VM's to the transfer LUN using the old hosts, moved the VM to a new host - which also had access to this transfer LUN - and migrated the VM another time to a new VMFS5 datastore. However, I actually did this because it's my personal preference to use newly created datastores, and you can certainly migrate the VM's only once and - after all VMs are migrated and the old hosts are gone - upgrade the datastores to VMFS5.

André