VMware vSphere side-by-side migration
Hi Experts,
I have a VMware question that I'm trying to play out in my head but I'm having trouble picturing it from start to finish.
Let us say we have 11-node DRS cluster with SAN attached storage (dual HBA for redundancy) on each host supporting about 200 VM's in the cluster. the vCenter 5.0 is running on Windows 2008 R1 and SQL Express 2005 SP1 (Don't ask; Didn't even think this was possible).
I basically want to stand up a brand new vCenter 5.5 2008 R2 server and use full fledged SQL 2008 R2 on a separate server. I also will have to update the hosts eventually as well.
My question is, what are the recommended procedures of accomplishing this cleanly with minimal downtime? Essentially, we do not trust our current installation (strange issues occur from time to time) and we just want to rebuild everything and bring the hosts over.
In our 11-node cluster, we have enough resources to bring down up to three hosts and still provide the necessary resources to support the virtualized environment.
Any ideas, suggestions, and solutions will be greatly appreciated.
KJ~
I have a VMware question that I'm trying to play out in my head but I'm having trouble picturing it from start to finish.
Let us say we have 11-node DRS cluster with SAN attached storage (dual HBA for redundancy) on each host supporting about 200 VM's in the cluster. the vCenter 5.0 is running on Windows 2008 R1 and SQL Express 2005 SP1 (Don't ask; Didn't even think this was possible).
I basically want to stand up a brand new vCenter 5.5 2008 R2 server and use full fledged SQL 2008 R2 on a separate server. I also will have to update the hosts eventually as well.
My question is, what are the recommended procedures of accomplishing this cleanly with minimal downtime? Essentially, we do not trust our current installation (strange issues occur from time to time) and we just want to rebuild everything and bring the hosts over.
In our 11-node cluster, we have enough resources to bring down up to three hosts and still provide the necessary resources to support the virtualized environment.
Any ideas, suggestions, and solutions will be greatly appreciated.
KJ~
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ASKER
One last question for you, Abhilash. What would be the purpose of disabling HA/DRS on the old cluster while moving hosts? It seems like it wouldn't hurt leaving this on and would still allow HA to perform in the case of a host going down during the migration.
If a cluster enabled for VMware HA loses so many resources that it can no longer fulfill its
failover requirements, a message appears and the cluster turns red.
That's the only reason. You can keep it on.
failover requirements, a message appears and the cluster turns red.
That's the only reason. You can keep it on.
ASKER
Thanks.
ASKER
Good points about distributed switches and events/logs. That did not dawn on me until now.