Need a little assistance...

Could you guys give me a little insight on a situation?

I just started a job where the previous sys admin put VMware 3.5 in production. The firm purchased 4.0 but instead of upgrading 3.5 to 4.0, he installed a separate 4.0 host system then left the company. The VMs still exist in 3.5. My question to you guys is would it be better/easier to import the VMs from the 3.5 world to 4.0 or scrap the current 4.0 setup and upgrade 3.5 to 4.0?

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JBrown

Log into your Vmware account and upgrade those licenses to 4.1 (its free as long as you have current support with them). Scrap the 4.0 and install 4.1 U1 a new. Import VMs from 3.5 to 4.1U1, scrap 3.5 and install 4.1U1 on that one too.:)
By the way, are you running a Domain Controller on a VM ?

spaat

JBrown wrote: »

[...] By the way, are you running a Domain Controller on a VM ?

Nope. The DC is not virtual. Would that be a problem if it were?

Thanks for the assist JBrown.

scott28tt

VMs built on a 3.5 host can easily be migrated to run on a 4.0 or 4.1 host.

A 3.5 VM will have the 3.5 version of VMware Tools installed within the guest OS, and the hardware of the VM will be what's called "version 4". Once you've migrated the VM to run on a 4.x host you can update the VMware Tools inside the guest OS and change the VM hardware to "version 7" - that's the version native to vSphere hosts.

Take a look at Chapter 11 of the Upgrade Guide: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_upgrade_guide.pdf

If your 3.5 host was built using ESX, you might also want to make the transition across to ESXi as 4.1 will be the last version of ESX, more on that here: VMware ESXi and ESX Info Center: Migrate to ESXi Hypervisor

Scott.

spaat

Good deal. Thanks a bunch Scott.

Forsaken_GA

I can second Scott's sentiment. We have a 3.5 environment, and we built out a 4.0 environment. All new provisioning takes place on the 4.0 environment, and except for a few snafus (mostly with storage, not with the VM itself), we've been successfully migrating the VM's from the 3.5 hosts to the 4.0 hosts.

The only difficulty with it is usually scheduling the downtime, since these are production hosts, and in some cases, we've had to build out new VMs in the new environment and just do a direct cutover because we couldn't afford the downtime for a direct migration. Those are issues that are going to plague you in any setup, virtual or bare iron.