Migrating to a new SAN, new Hosts, and a new version of VMWare - Question.

[ade333]

I'm working in an environment that has multiple configurations issues.  That said, the network is currently stable.

All of the existing hardware is very old and new equipment has been purchased.  I'm about to introduce a new SAN, new Hosts, a new VCenter server and ESXi5.1 (coming from 4.0)

I have done some extensive investigation of the configurations and I believe I know where the problems exist, however I would like to leave the existing network as is so that I know I have a working "fall back" option.  So, my plan so far is to do this:

1) Put all of the new equipment on the same subnets of the existing equipment.

2) Shut down all VMs and isolate all network communications (i.e. disconnect servers from the rest of the network)

3) Attach the new vCenter server to both SANs and use Veeam Fast SCP to move the VMware files to the new SAN.

4) Build new VMs on the new Hosts using the data that has been moved to the new SAN

5) Disconnect the old SAN and old ESX 4 Hosts from the network.

6) Boot the new VMs, upgrade VMware tools, reboot

7) Shutdown VMs, upgrade virtual machine hardware version, start VMs (allow for MS device/driver installs for the new virtual hardware,) reboot

😎 Test & Confirm network IP addresses, connectivity, and applications

9) Reconnect the servers to the rest of the network/internet.

Since the new vCenter server and new ESXi hosts will be running a new version of VMware, are there any additional steps I need to take to make sure the VMs that were previous running on ESX4.0 will work well with ESXi5?  Anything else I should look out for?

Thanks

[vMariaL]

Hi ade333, I assume that you speak about VMware vSphere 5.1, not 5.2...

[ade333]

Oh, yes - typo there.  Thank you

[Josh26]

The only real step related to the VMs is that you may want to consider adding "upgrade virtual machine version" to your process.

[dhanarajramesh]

more over, in the production environment, you should work with application team as well net work security team. because when your moving vm to new boxes u might face lot of issue. most of them related to application and port issue. you should inform the network and security team to list out old hosts opened/closed connections IP/ports. and need to open the same port in your new servers. it is easy to describe when it's come to real you will face lot and lot of issue

[ade333]

Thank you, Josh.  That is an excellent point.  I will be using the Update Manager to address this, but it is an important step to note and confirm- I'll be adding it to my scope.

[ade333]

dhanarajramesh, excellent point, thank you