Specifications

Example Upgrade Scenarios 9
Upgrade scenarios for vSphere 4.1 include cases with and without clustered hosts, hosts that you upgrade
on the same machine on which they are currently running (in-place upgrades), and hosts that you upgrade
using different machines (migration upgrades).
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Moving Virtual Machines Using vMotion During an Upgrade,” on page 217
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“Moving Powered Off or Suspended Virtual Machines During an Upgrade with vCenter Server,” on
page 218
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“Migrating ESX 4.x or ESXi 4.x Hosts to ESXi 5.5 in a PXE-Booted Auto Deploy Installation,” on
page 219
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“Upgrading vSphere Components Separately in a Horizon View Environment,” on page 220
Moving Virtual Machines Using vMotion During an Upgrade
This scenario is a migration upgrade. The migration upgrade is a managed transition rather than a strict
upgrade. By using vMotion to move virtual machines directly from one production host to another
production host, you minimize downtime of the virtual machines.
The following example provides a high-level overview of the upgrade process in an environment with
ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0 or higher and vCenter Server 5.5, using vMotion to migrate your running virtual machines
to ESXi 5.5. The hosts in your environment must be licensed for and able to use vMotion.
You can perform a migration upgrade without vMotion. The only difference is the amount of downtime for
the virtual machines.
A migration upgrade calls for sufficient resources to run the production environment partly on older hosts
and partly on upgraded hosts. Any required redundancies and safeguards must be available on both
upgraded and non-upgraded infrastructure during the transition.
Prerequisites
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Verify that one or more machines meets ESXi 5.5 requirements.
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Verify that empty host storage is sufficient to hold a portion of your production virtual machines.
Ideally, the storage is large enough to hold all of the migrated virtual machines. A larger capacity for
virtual machines on this extra storage means fewer operations are required before all your virtual
machines are migrated.
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If your environment has vCenter Guided Consolidation, uninstall it.
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Run the Host Agent Pre-Upgrade Checker. See “Run the vCenter Host Agent Pre-Upgrade Checker,”
on page 57.
VMware, Inc.
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