Introduction

This is a series of posts where I will tell how I upgraded my environment to ESX 4.0.

Happy reading!

Goals

  1. Migrate our current environment consisting of four overworked ESX 3.5 U4 hosts running 111 active VMs to ten vSphere 4.0 U1 shiny new G6 Nehalem wonderful goodies
  2. Modify as little as possible from defaults – „Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
  3. Don’t screw up too many things during the process :)

Plan from 10.000ft

  1. Upgrade Virtual Center
  2. Install vSphere on the hosts and connect them to vCenter
  3. Migrate Virtual Machines

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

Background

The current environment consists of 4 ESX 3.5 U4 hosts running on HP Bl460 G5. VirtualCenter runs as a Win 2003 virtual machine and connects to a separate physical SQL 2005 SP3 server. Storage is hosted on two HP EVA systems connected through 4Gb Fibre Channel.

In order to simplify the SAN I chose to configure the blade chassis switches in Access Gateway mode (in this mode they use NPIV to present all the blades on the master switch on a single port and the blade switch is transparent). Using this feature I have only one real Fibre Channel switch where I setup zoning and the others are just “port extenders”. For zoning I chose the “single initiator” strategy where I create a single zone for each server with all the storage ports included on each redundant switch (I tried at first to create a zone for each storage port and each server but the configuration that would result would be extremely difficult to manage and as far as I found on the internet there is no downside to my strategy).

Upgrading Virtual Center

  1. I backed-up the VirtualCenter database like  good boy
  2. I installed the new version of the vSphere client on my machine
  3. In Virtual Center client I renamed the old virtual machine so that I could deploy a shiny new Windows 2008 64bit virtual machine with the old name
  4. I gave the new VM 3GB of RAM, 2vCPUs and two 20GB disks (minimum supported requirements as we were already oversubscribed with resources)
  5. I made a note of the host where the new and old Virtual Center VMs were running
  6. I forgot to copy the SSL files from the old VM C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\SSL to a safe location before going to the next step so don’t you do like me :) ! Also do copy the sysprep files.
  7. Stopped the old VM and recreated its account in Active Directory
  8. Connected directly to the host of the new VM with the vSphere client
  9. Configured the operating system of the new VM and joined the domain
  10. I then installed the 64bit SQL native client for both SQL 2008 and SQL 2005 as we will migrate the SQL to 2008 in the future and configured the ODBC datasource  by running c:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe and selecting the SQL Native Driver (choose version 10 if you have SQL2008) and SQL authentication with the old username (you do remember it, don’t you?). You can give any name to the datasource.
  11. Now I copied the SSL files in C:\Users\All Users\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\SSL . I couldn’t browse the folder using Explorer so I started PowerShell as Administrator and issued a mkdir for the folder and then copied the files using the copy command.
  12. To make things upgrade faster I configured Bulk Logged recovery model in the database options in SQL Management Console

  1. Started the vCenter setup and sailed through the installation choosing to run the vCenter as SYSTEM, otherwise I left the defaults. The installation took about 16 minutes. When it finished it upgraded the vpx clients on all the hosts without problems (this happened very quickly, less than a minute).
  2. Started the vCenter client and saw no issues – yuppiee!
  3. Actually there were some :) . It lost the 3.5 Licensing server. I put it back but I still had no VMotion. After googling a little I disabled and enabled back VMotion on the VMKernel network port group – this solved it. Also the permissions we assigned on one folder of virtual machines were gone – you have been warned :) .

  1. Copied back the sysprep files from where I saved them
  2. Upgraded update manager and Converter and installed the plugins on my Admin PC
  3. Activated back Full Recovery Logging on the database
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