Import “VSphere 4 VMFS Datastore” in new “VSphere 5 VMFS Datastore”

Question

I have two vSphere environment:

• one composed by a vCenter 4 and two Esx Host 4.0 sharing a clustered datastore (VMFS3) and several virtual machine
• one composed by a vSphere 5 and two Esxi Host 5.0 sharing a empty clustered datastore (VMFS5)

Both datastore are configured on SAN LUN and I need to migrate the VM from first environment to the second. I thinked the following scenario:

1. I publish the LUN of first datastore to vm Esxi 5.0 Host and I mount the VMFS3 datastore on it while it's mounted also in the two Esx Host 4.0.

2. For each VM (while the others remains up) I shutdown a VM and I copy them from VMFS3 datastore to VMFS5 datastore, upgrade and power on

Can i execute the first step? Are there better methods to execute the migration of VM in this environment?

Answer 1

I think this is a good approach. For step 2, you can use storage vMotion to move the VM to the new datastore without downtime. This is a good chance to change the disk format to thin/thick if needed.

You can then upgrade the VM tools, power down the VM, take a snapshot (just in case), and then upgrade the VM to the new hardware version. Once you do this, you can not revert hardware versions and therefore will not be able to run this VM on any ESXi 4 hosts.