vWire makes that process simple, and this white paper will go through the steps of upgrading the environment from ESXi 3.5.0 Update 4 to ESXi 4.0. If you have functional clusters and VMotion, this
can be done with no downtime, and even a relatively large environment can be completed in a
matter of days.
By Dominic Rivera
Upgrading to VMware
vSphere 4.0 with vWire 1.1
Expediting the upgrade process with vWire
WHITE PAPERContents
3 The Upgrade Process4 Virtual Hardware 35 Unnecessary Virtual Hardware9 vSMP Search10 Independent Disks11 SUSE 10 with BusLogic Problem12 VMs with Large Data Drives
2 | WHITE PAPER | Upgrading to VMware vSphere with vWire 1.1Upgrading to VMware vSphere 4.0 with Tripwire vWire 1.1
The Upgrade Process Built In Searches and ActionsUpgrading VMware vSphere hosts to vSphere First, I want to mention all of the searches and ESXi is a pretty straight forward process: actions that are built right into vWire 1.1. Out 1. Put the host into maintenance mode. of the box you can search for conditions that 2. Upgrade the host would make VMotion fail such as CPU incom-3. Take the host out of maintenance mode patibilities, connected serial or parallel ports, connected CD-ROMs, snapshots etc. vWire also If you have functional clusters and VMotion, this comes with built in actions that you can apply can be done with no downtime, and even a rela- to your searches like «Disconnect CDROM» or tively large environment can be completed in a «Commit Snapshot» and you can couple the two matter of days. of them together so you can search for all VMs with connected CD-ROMs and then run the action However, upgrading virtual machines (VMs) to the to disconnect some or all of them in one quick latest virtual hardware and tools will require some motion. Using vWire you can quickly tell why downtime. While the downtime is unavoidable, your VMs might not VMotion, and correct them it's a time that you can take advantage of to make before you begin moving all of your VMs around sure that everything in your virtual environment to upgrade to VMware vSphere ESX 4.0.is up to speed. There are a number of modifica-tions that can only be made to VMs while they are powered off, and while the corrections are easy to make, it's often difficult to work your way through every single VM to audit them for the misconfigu-rations. I'll list a few here that I have experienced and that I'm guessing are around in most environ-ments, but the truth is that every environment is different but there is always a need to be able to audit your environment quickly to mine this information. vWire makes that process simple, and I'll go through the steps that I went through as I upgraded my environment from ESXi 3.5.0 Update 4 to ESXi 4.0.
3 | WHITE PAPER | Upgrading to VMware vSphere with vWire 1.1Virtual Hardware 3
Virtual Hardware 3. ESX 2.* Virtual Hardware 3. ESX 3.* Virtual Hardware 4. ESX 4.* Virtual Hardware 7
When upgrading from ESX v2.5 to ESX 3.0.1+ it was possible to do hot migrations using «DMotion» to migrate a VM from a VMFS2 file-system to a VMFS3 filesystem with no downtime, and for a handful of VMs in my environment it turns out that they were never upgraded to the newer virtual hardware. While in theory I should be able to take these VMs from virtual hardware 3 to virtual hardware 7, I don't trust that this is going to happen smoothly and I'd like to make sure all of my VMs are upgraded to at least virtual hardware 4 before I begin upgrading hosts to vSphere 4. In vWire, I can easily look across my entire environment. The property I'm looking for here is «VM Version» and the value of a VM on virtual hardware 3 is «vmx-03». I find just a couple VMs that are left in this state, but I'd rather know about them now than during the upgrade. This search comes in handy again later as I complete my migration and I need to keep track of which VMs still need to be upgraded. At that point I'll change my search to either be «vmx-04» or simply «VM Version» DOES_NOT_EQUAL «vmx-07», then I'll have a tidy list of what still needs to be upgraded.
4 | WHITE PAPER | Upgrading to VMware vSphere with vWire 1.1Unnecessary Virtual Hardware
Unnecessary Virtual HardwarePhysical to Virtual (p2v) conver-sions often leave behind a number of artifacts from the physical servers that are almost certainly unneces-sary in a virtual environment, these include Virtual Parallel Ports, Virtual Serial Ports, Virtual USB Control-lers and Ports. Here in vWire, we can quickly set up a search to look for any of these that may be left around. The related objects that I've added below are «VirtualParallelPort» «VirtualSe-rialPort» «VirtualUSB» and «Vi... [download for more]
