Move VM from vSphere to ESX 3.5?

[G_Dom]

We have a number of older ESX 3.5 Hosts that will not support vSphere. One idea that we are floating around is to 'retire' these hosts from active service, but to keep them at a secondary site for a cheap DR solution, the idea being that if we had an issue in primary Data Center we could move critical VMs to the 'backup' site. The question is; will this be possible if we upgrade our Production environemnt to vSphere? We assume that it would be impossible to do a hot move from vSphere to ESX 3.5, but would it be possible to migrate a powered-down VM 'backwards'?

Thanks,

gary

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

as long as all your vmotion requirements are met, you can live migrate between ESX4 and ESX3.5 Hosts. I would leave the tools out of date and the virtual hardware set at v.4 until your entire environment is on vSphere4

Also, check out VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager if you haven't seen it.

[G_Dom]

So we can migrate both directions? In this case, live migrations would not be possible because of CPU incompatability between the hosts, but off-line migrations would suffice.

[AndreTheGiant]

but would it be possible to migrate a powered-down VM 'backwards'?

Yes, but you must use virtual hardware v4 (not v7 that is not supported on ESX 3.x).

Andre