Community.spiceworks.com Topic 317149 Best Way to Migrat

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20 Replies BEST ANSWERBrentMHK Mar 25, 2013 at 4:57 PM

I'd say upgrade vCenter first, add the 5.1 hosts, then vMotion the VMs to the new hosts. Of course, this

depends on your licensing and how many hosts your vCenter license can manage.

· Reply ·

SinaOwolabi Mar 25, 2013 at 5:02 PM

Wow thanks BrentMHK

If they upgrade vCenter, do they add the 5.1 hosts to the same cluster as the 4.1 hosts, or create a separate

one? And I suppose they have to make sure that all vDS switching on the 4.1 environment is replicated on

the 5.1 hosts too, correct?

Is there anything at all special that they need to do to prep the 5.1 hosts besides adding them to the cluster,

and making sure licenses are sufficient?

Sorry for the questions, I'm just trying to be certain so that they don't come after me if anything breaks :-)

· Reply ·

HELPFUL POSTJames (PHD Virtual) Mar 25, 2013 at 5:19 PM

PHD Virtual is a Spiceworks Partner.

You can have a mixed cluster running 4.1/5.1 for the duration of the migration but it's not something you

want to continue to run. If it was me I would stand up a fresh 5.1 cluster then move everything over. I would

just make sure your 5.1 hosts' storage/network config match the config on the 4.1 hosts before you move

anything over to the new cluster.

· Reply ·

BrentMHK Mar 25, 2013 at 5:26 PM

I just have a very basic setup here so other users will be better qualified to answer your questions.

· Reply ·


Thanks James, Brent!

I did tell them to do a fresh 5.1 cluster!

Wow. Now they want me to do it. If only I could get some hand-holding...

Thanks a lot for the timely and informative answers.

· Reply ·


Sorry I have an additional question to ask. Since they will be moving VMs from DL 580 to 980 servers, and

these both have E7-XXXX Xeon processors, are they close enough to be considered in the same processor

family or is CPU masking going to be involved?

Related Research: Software

Best way to Migrate VMs from ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5.1 hosts

SinaOwolabi Mar 25, 2013 at 4:56 PM | VMWARE

Hi

Im wondering what is the best upgrade and migration path from vSphere 4.1 to 5.1.

My client recently got new servers and would like to install vSphere 5.1 and move the VMs on 4.1 to 5.1. The older servers are HP DL580s, and the newer servers are HP DL980s.

They are connected to the same SAN LUNs, and will be connected to the same datastores.

What is the best way to move the VMs on the 4.1 DL 580 servers to 5.1 DL 980s?

Is it possible to add the 5.1 hosts to the 4.1 vSphere Datacenter, and use vMotion to move them? What's the best way to do this without downtime?

Thanks!

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· ·

James (PHD Virtual) Mar 25, 2013 at 7:02 PM

PHD Virtual is a Spiceworks Partner.

I'm not all that familiar with that particular chipset so I can't say for sure. This only applies if you do a vmotion

from the 4.1 to 5.1 cluster. I would take a test VM and verify you can do a vmotion across these clusters

without issue. Once you get all of the VM's over to 5.1 then you don't have to worry about this since all of the

hosts will be identical and no masking would be needed.

· Reply ·

Samui Mar 26, 2013 at 3:09 PM

Before performing an upgrade, ask these questions:

1) Do you have any apps that are not compatible with vSphere 5.1?

- I've seen some medical imaging applications that were not compatible and wound up causing some

performance and support issues.

2) Check the block sizes of the existing Datastores, and verify them?

3) Is the customer using any SSL Certs in the environment?

- If so, and they are CA Certs, they will need to be recreated as the cyphering changed.

As mentioned previously, I agree with the others and my recommendation would be to stand up a fresh 5.1

cluster. However, that's where I deviate from the others.

You mentioned that the current 4.1 environment has a vDS. That poses an obstacle. Is it a vmware vDS, or

is this a Cisco Nexus addin? Either way, it's an obstacle. If it is a Cisco Nexus v1000, then read, read, read

the upgrade documentation. (http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-

esxi-vcenter-server-51-upgrade-guide.pdf) The earlier recommendation of doing a in-place upgrade may

actually cause you pain and suffering - as the upgrade could likely break the vDS. And if the VC is a VM, this

may cause you a headache trying to regain access.

Once the new 5.1 cluster has been stood up, here's how I would migrate the existing environment.

1) Disconnect the 4.1 hosts from the current 4.1 vCenter.

2) Add the hosts into a separate cluster inside the 5.1 vCenter.

* Not only does this provide an easier way of migrating the VMs, this also allows you a "turn-back or fail-

back" plan.

3) Ensure that the new hosts can see the same networks and storage the old hosts were using.

4) With a non-mission critical VM, attempt a warm vmotion.

* I suspect that the CPU families will be different enough that a warm vmotion will not be an option. If that is

the case, then you will need to do a cold migration (Power off the VMs and vmotion them).

5) After the VMs have been migrated, wait a week or so before this step. Upgrade the VMTools and the

virtual hardware. (This requires a reboot of the VM - so do it during a maintenance window, or scheduled

downtime for the VMs.)

6) If you have space on the SAN, create a new datastore and svmotion VMs from the old 4.1 Datastores

(VMFS 3) to the newer 5.1 Datastores (VMFS 5). You can just do an in-place "upgrade" of the old

datastores, however, if the block sizes were different, then you may actually seem some possible

performance issues. This is not a best practice nor recommended by VMware.

As always, read the upgrade guide.

· Reply ·

Shawnlo Mar 26, 2013 at 7:33 PM

This is kind of interesting as I just upgraded a bunch of my Servers from 4.1 to 5.1b over the last couple of

days.

My process went like this:

Upgraded vCenter 4.1 to 5.1

After vCenter was upgraded I then installed update manager

I set up update manager and uploaded the ESXi 5.1.0 image to update managers ESXi Images section

I then put the host I wanted to update in maintenance mode (I have 5 Servers in my cluster)

Once the host was in maintenance mode I used update manager and remediated upgrades with the 5.1

Upgrade Baseline I had created,

Server did it's update came back up, I then did the remediation of the patches baseline and exited

maintenance mode.

the process was pretty seamless with zero downtime, other than vCenter being inaccessible for a short time.

· Reply ·


This is all pretty much great information.

Thanks a lot for listening and for sharing, guys

The environment doesnt have a vDS as I earlier thought so I'm going to dive in and see how it goes.

One last thing, Samui... I'm not very sure what you mean by:

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Do you mean that, if I have upgraded vCenter from 4.1 to 5.1, i should remove the 4.1 hosts from their

vCenter and add them to a new cluster in the newly upgraded vCenter, before I try to move the VMs?

Thanks!

· Reply ·


The network is a bit tricky too though.. the ESX 4.1 hosts pretty much have 4 1Gb NICs, while the ESXi 5.1

hosts have 2x1Gb NICs, 2x10Gb NICs, and 2x10GB Fibre Channel ports (they also have SAN HBAs, so no

network storage connections).

ESX 4.1 have 2 switches each, vswitch0 and vswitch1, with teaming going on.. vswitch0 is

vmkernel+vmotion, while vswitch1 has all the virtual machine traffic, vlans and what not.

Trying to figure out how to split teaming properly on the ESXi hosts NICs.. does it make sense to team

1GBand10GB NIC?

Getting interesting!

· Reply ·

Samui Mar 29, 2013 at 4:51 PM

I would not try mixing the two nics (1G and 10G). Determing how you want your network connections is

really up to you. I'm assuming you got a new 12th gen Dell R620/720. If so, then your new network card is

actually a CNA (Converged Network Adapter). And likely, it is either a Broadcom or Intel Adapter.

Depending on my customers, what I've been doing with these new CNAs, is using the 1G ports for the Svc

Console and vMotion traffic and splitting the 10G for iSCSI and VM Traffic. Since you have HBAs, you

probably aren't running iSCSI storage in your environment. I'm also going to assume that you have a 10G

network. If so, then what I would recommend would be to just use the 10G ports on the CNA. You could use

NPAR (NIC Partitioning) within the bios to carve up the 10G adapters into 4 NICs. Of course, this means that

your network admin will need to trunk the 10G ports down to your hosts with all vlans for svc console,

vmotion, and vmtraffic.

I'd recommend doing the following:

Port 1 (10G)

- 1G Partition for Service Console (vmnic0)

- 3G Partition for vMotion (vmnic1)

- 3G Partition for VM Traffic (vmnic2)


Port 2 (10G)

- 1G Partition for Service Console (vmnic4)

- 3G Partition for vMotion (vmnic5)



Once ESXi has been installed, inside the network config, you could then do this:

vswitch0

vmk0 svc console -----> NIC Team - vmnic0 & vmnic4 (Active/Standby)

vswitch1

vmk1 vMotion ------------> NIC Team - vmnic1 & vmnic5 (Active/Standby or Active Active)

vswitch2

vmtraffic -------------------> NIC Team - vmnic2, vmnic3, vmnic6, vmnic7 (Active/Active/Active/Active)

Of course, the 10G traffic may be overkill and you may not need 12G of bandwidth for your VM data traffic -

but you never know. And you can play with the bandwidth levels of NPAR as you need. Just know two things

- you can only divide up to 4NICs per 10G port (ie, four 2.5G NICs, one 10G NIC, two 5G NICs, or as I did

above, etc). And lastly, whatever bandwidth you give to vmotion, vmotion will take it and use it.

· Reply ·

SinaOwolabi Apr 6, 2013 at 2:34 PM

Thanks a lot Samui!

I've decided to setup a test environment of sorts using VMware Workstation..

I've setup a vSphere 4.0 cluster with two ESX4.0 hosts and a little VM. I've also learnt that the hosts have to

have the same number of processors/cores before they can be in the same cluster, or on the same

datacenter. I'm seemingly unable to create a 5.1 cluster with 5.1 hosts because of this. ( I successfully

upgraded vSphere 4.0 to 5.0).

Is there a way of getting past this? i doubt if the live environment's servers will have the same

processors/cores (trying to migrate from DL580 G6 servers to DL980 G7 servers.

I thought EVC was supposed to help to gloss this over, since they are all Xeon processors/cores?

I wonder if this is making any sense to anyone? Any suggestions?

· Reply ·

Samui Apr 6, 2013 at 3:59 PM

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Also, if you are going to turn on EVC, check and make sure the level you select covers your different sets of

processors. I believe the Merom (sp) setting covers most cpu famiies for intel.

· Reply ·


Thanks. The vCenter isnt in the cluster. Ill fiddle around some more.

· Reply ·

John773 Apr 6, 2013 at 7:34 PM

Synchronet is an IT service provider.

Samui wrote:

Yes, EVC is "supposed" to mask the processors. However, if your vcenter is a VM

inside the cluster, you running into some "trickiness" that is needed to enable EVC.

Also, if you are going to turn on EVC, check and make sure the level you select

covers your different sets of processors. I believe the Merom (sp) setting covers

most cpu famiies for intel.

Just note what host its on, and connect to the host directly (and make sure no idiot enabled lock down

mode).

· Reply ·


Hi

I created a different vm for the vCenter server that's on the same level as the hosts, so its technically on an

external server.

· Reply ·

RKDTOO May 20, 2013 at 4:53 AM

Once the new 5.1 cluster has been stood up, here's how I would migrate the existing environment.

1) Disconnect the 4.1 hosts from the current 4.1 vCenter.

2) Add the hosts into a separate cluster inside the 5.1 vCenter.

* Not only does this provide an easier way of migrating the VMs, this also allows you

a "turn-back or fail-back" plan.

3) Ensure that the new hosts can see the same networks and storage the old hosts

were using.

4) With a non-mission critical VM, attempt a warm vmotion.

* I suspect that the CPU families will be different enough that a warm vmotion will

not be an option. If that is the case, then you will need to do a cold migration (Power

off the VMs and vmotion them).

5) After the VMs have been migrated, wait a week or so before this step. Upgrade

the VMTools and the virtual hardware. (This requires a reboot of the VM - so do it

during a maintenance window, or scheduled downtime for the VMs.)

6) If you have space on the SAN, create a new datastore and svmotion VMs from

the old 4.1 Datastores (VMFS 3) to the newer 5.1 Datastores (VMFS 5). You can

just do an in-place "upgrade" of the old datastores, however, if the block sizes were

different, then you may actually seem some possible performance issues. This is

not a best practice nor recommended by VMware.

As always, read the upgrade guide.

I am faced with similar task as the OP. Mine is a bit simpler since I am upgrading/migrating to identical

hardware; so I have homogenous environments. However I need clarification about some steps please.

After steps 1 and 2, since vdSwitch "lives" in vCenter what happens to the vdSwitch and its port groups? Do

the port groups move over and are visible in the vCenter 5.1 after I disconnect/connect the 4.1 hosts? Do I

need to first mimic the configuration of the vdSwitch in the vCenter 5.1? After I connect a 4.1 host to vCenter

5.1 will the VMs running on that host keep their defined Network Connections (port groups)? Just as

important - will the VMs keep their port groups after vMotion to 5.1 hosts? What do I need to do to make sure

those things go correctly?

· Reply ·

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Sep 15, 2013 at 5:20 AM

Can we upgrade from EXs 4.0 to exsi 5,1 directly????

· Reply ·

vSphere Feb 5, 2014 at 3:51 AM

You cannot upgrade from ESX 4.0 to ESXi 5.1. But you can do from ESX 4.0 U1 onwards.

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Community.spiceworks.com Topic 317149 Best Way to Migrat