Blue Gears: Difficult Journey from ESX v3 to vSphere 4

The Difficult Journey from ESX v3 to vSphere 4

Migrating from VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 to VMware vSphere 4 was a difficult journey for me. There were several issues with this migration, that I have documented in more detail elsewhere (http://www.astroarch.com/blog). But now I put them all in one place for you to understand why such a journey requires good planning, a method to roll-back just in case, and what gotchas may bite you as you go through your own journeys.

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The first step was upgrading my hardware from HP DL380 G3s to HP DL380 G5s, which I actually did quite a bit before vSphere 4 came out. It was part of my normal hardware upgrade, but without the G5 chassis, vSphere would not run as it requires 64 bit hardware, not EMT-64 bit (or partial 64 bit)hardware.

My saga continues with attempts to install VMware vCenter 4.x which was the first difficulty due to the requirement that I also upgrade my SQL Server to MSSQL 2008, but before I could do that I had to upgrade my Linux PDC due to the new requirements of Microsoft Windows 2008, which required me to make changes to Windows Registry to work with my Linux PDC. A simple upgrade of VMware vCenter lead to some major upgrades of other key components.

Now it was time to upgrade my ESX hosts to do this I employed Host Profiles to speed up the upgrade process.

Upgrading the hosts to vSphere 4 now required me to upgrade the virtual hardware within the VMs which had its own issues. As well as issues with 2nd virtual disks with virtual hardware 7 that had to be solved.

The environment is now running, or so I thought, since vCenter is running as a VM, it is important to keep vCenter running. This was solved with some judicious service edits to improve dependency handling within the vCenter VM.

But what is a virtual environment without a way to perform backups. My new method included the use of a GmbH DISC Blu-safe. There were some interesting issues to solve with accessing this device from within a VM.

After upgrading my IBM DS3400 I found that the LUNs were laid out poorly and had to adjust their use so more spindles were available for each of my LUNs presented to vSphere ESX. This one action improved overall performance.

With the release of v4.1 of vSphere it behoved me to upgrade. This update did not go as smooth as I wanted either but it was better than the initial upgrade to v4. Just a few issues going forward that needed to be addressed. Including the resetting of all my service dependencies.

With all the third party product testing I do within the virtual environment, I finally had to upgrade to a full Active Directory instead of a Linux PDC which also required changes to the domain used by VMware vCenter.

The next change I made to my virtual environment was to move from DL 380 G5 systems to an HP C3000 Bladesystem. This hardware upgrade was the smoothest in my vSphere Upgrade saga. This final upgrade moved me from a 6 foot baker's rack with machines stuffed within it, to a half rack with only my UPS devices, the Blade System, my SAN, and the necessary KVM and network switches.

The second to most recent change I made was to migrate from standard VMware vSwitches to Distributed vNetwork Switches. This had a serious and catastrophic impact on my virtual environment until I found the solution of using standard VMware vSwitches for key VMs and distributed vNetwork Switches for all the others.

The most recent change I made was to upgrade to vSphere 4.1 U1, which went without a hitch. A bit of a surprise that.

While the Journey was long and still incomplete, my virtual environment over the years has shrunk from 4 baker's rack full of equipment down to a half rack with many spots still available for more hardware. Next upgrade will most likely be newer blades and newer releases of vSphere. It has been quite a journey and I practice what I write about. My most recent book covers many of these issues as well: VMware ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise, 2nd Edition.

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