Hi guys
I am preparing for the 3.5 to 4 upgrade of our small VMware environment. This consists of:
Each of the two ESX hosts is connected with two FC cards to the two FC switches.
The DS3400 is also hooked up with two cards to the FC switches. The SAN is only used to store VMs.
I have already upgraded Vcenter (which is running on a Win2k3 VM) and I'm happily running VirtualCenter Server 4.0 for a month now.
We have one cluster consisting of just the two ESX hosts.
Reading through all the posts here I get the idea that upgrading my ESX3.5 hosts might not be the best idea. I did not install them myself so I don't know if the partitioning is 'special' or custom, but it currently looks like this:
[root@esx1 root]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 9.9G 1.2G 8.2G 13% /
/dev/sda1 99M 28M 67M 30% /boot
none 132M 0 132M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda5 1012M 33M 928M 4% /tmp
/dev/sda3 4.0G 291M 3.5G 8% /var
/dev/sda7 17G 154M 16G 1% /vmimages
Reading up on the upgrade docs, I see I will need a local datastore for the new service console, because that is now stored in a vmdk. This datastore is not available yet, so I'd have to create it, however that will result in a messy partitioning. A reinstall would not have this problem because then you can wipe out the host and start with a fresh disk.
I would like to know what the exact procedure is when reinstalling an ESX host. I imagine it would be something like:
Put esx1 into Maintenance Mode - this will evacuate all VMs to the esx2
Remove esx1 from cluster
Disconnect FC fibers from esx1
Boot esx1 with ESX4 DVD and install, configure network so that it is at least reachable by VCenter.
Once installed reconnect FC fibers
Add host back to cluster
I would like to know if I remove the host, and then add a cleanly installed one back, will Vcenter then automagically configure the storage again?
I am no SAN guru and I remember when the guy installed it, it seems pretty complex with WWN numbers, zones etc.
Thanks
