We are budgeting for more licensing and hardware for 2014 and want to do this right away in January. I am trying to decide what is the best order of operations for adding two additional vmware hosts to our current vsphere installation, and also upgrading our vsphere / esx 4.1 u3 to the latest and greatest.
We have 3 Dell PowerEdge R710's running ESX 4.1 U3. In this vmware cluster there is a vcenter server 4.1 U3 virtual machine managing this. All three servers are about 90% memory utilized so we are adding 2 additional servers. Likely the Dell PowerEdge R620 since we can fit 2 in the space of a 710. The storage is on an EMC NX4 NFS san which will be upgraded also but not yet, let's just tackle the vmware part of it.
When adding 2 additional R620's, should I install ESX 4.1 on them and join them to the existing cluster, and THEN upgrade vcenter, and each esx one by one? Reason I ask is because at 90% usage on the 3 current servers, I need the 2 additional servers to support operations while upgrades are taking place. They would be able to hold vm's vmotioned off while each host is getting upgraded one at a time.
So is that the best way to go about adding hosts and upgrading? Would I add them as 4.1's, then they would be available as vmotion targets so I have room to start upgrading hosts one at a time?
If I update vcenter to the latest version, it is backwards comparable and can manage the 4.1 hosts as well as 5.x hosts? I suppose version 5.5 is the latest that I would be receiving from VMWare? It's ESXi right, so how is that upgrade from ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5.5? How much storage space do I need for ESXi 5.5, as I am specking out these Dell R620's and need to know how much hard drive to put in.
The Steps that you must follow
- Upgrade vCenter Server
- Upgrade ESX hosts (because we are doing a hardware refresh we are just going to install 5.5 on our new hosts and add them to the cluster and then decommission our existing)
- Upgrade VMWare Tools
- Upgrade Datastores
ESXi 5.5 has these storage requirements:
The Steps that you must follow
- Upgrade vCenter Server
- Upgrade ESX hosts (because we are doing a hardware refresh we are just going to install 5.5 on our new hosts and add them to the cluster and then decommission our existing)
- Upgrade VMWare Tools
- Upgrade Datastores
ESXi 5.5 has these storage requirements:
Thank you for your response.
Let me clarify and please point out if I am not understanding:
- Upgrade vCenter Server - Take existing 4.1 U3 snapshot it just to be sure, then upgrade it directly from 4.1 to 5.5.
Because vCenter is backwards compatable, existing 4.1 hosts will still be managed in the time being.
- Add the two new Dell R620s with fresh ESXi 5.5 installs. Join them to the new cluster with newly updated vCenter 5.5.
- Vmotion vm's from existing R710's to new 620s to prevent downtime.
- Upgrade existing R710's ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5.5
- Vmotion vm's back and distribute them evenly across all servers
- Upgrade vmware tools on each VM as time permits to allow for guest OS reboots.
- Upgrade datastores as time permits (is any downtime required?)
Yes.
Why switch to VMFS-5?
What are the limitations for VMFS-5?
Note: The actual maximum size of a LUN will depend on the capabilities of RAID controller/adapter driver that is used on the vSphere host.
For vSphere 5.x storage configuration maximums pertaining to 2TB LUN support please review Configuration Maximums for VMware vSphere 5.0 and also for Configuration Maximums for vSphere 5.1.
Can I upgrade while my virtual machines are running?
Yes. Upgrading from VMFS-3 to VMFS-5 can be done on-the-fly (virtual machines do not need to be powered-off, suspended, or migrated).
Do I have to use the command-line to upgrade to VMFS-5?
The upgrade to from VMFS-3 to VMFS-5 can be done either via the ESXi 5.x command-line or via vSphere Client.
Note: Ensure that all ESX hosts accessing the LUN are already on ESXi 5.x.
My upgraded VMFS-5 does not have a 1MB block size. Why?
Upgraded VMFS-5 partitions will retain the partition characteristics of the original VMFS-3 datastore, including file block-size, sub-block size of 64K, etc. To take full advantage of all the benefits of VMFS-5, migrate the virtual machines to another datastore(s), delete the existing datastore, and re-create it using VMFS-5.
Note: Increasing the size of an upgraded VMFS datastore beyond 2TB changes the partition type from MBR to GPT. However, all other features/characteristics continue to remain same.
The upgrade to VMFS-5 fails with these errors:
Thank you, that is good information on vmfs-5.
Currently our datastores are NFS on an EMC NX4. We are also looking to add an EMC VNX5200. Perhaps we will establish new vmfs-5 nfs datastores on the new system and vmotion machines to it.
Eventually the NX4 will be repurposed for backup / archival and the new VNX5200 will be in production.
Ok Sorry.
Do you need any help or u r ok?
Don't be sorry, that is all good information.
Does the vmfs version apply if the datastore is NFS?
I think after that question I should be good and I will mark your answer.
Thank you again.
No, as you know I was talking about VMFS.
Regards
Ok thank you for your help today. It provides a great high level overview of the milestones required to accomplish this upgrade. Hopefully I will be ordering all the required pieces in the next few days.