Installation guide

Upgrading by Moving Powered Off or Suspended Virtual Machines
(with vCenter Server)
This scenario is known as a cold migration upgrade. When you use cold migration to move virtual machines
from one host to another host, additional downtime is required for the virtual machines.
This scenario assumes that the hosts do not have VMotion.
Prerequisites
The requirements for a cold migration upgrade are as follows:
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One or more machines meeting ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0 requirements.
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Empty host storage sufficient to hold a portion of your virtual machines. Ideally, the storage should be
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.
Before you begin this procedure, complete the following tasks:
1 Upgrade VirtualCenter 2.x to vCenter Server 4.0.
a Make sure your database is compatible with vCenter Server 4.0. This release discontinues support for
some database versions and adds support for other database versions. See the Compatibility
Matrixes on the VMware vSphere documentation Web site.
b Make sure that you have the required permissions to perform this procedure. See “Database
Prerequisites,” on page 39.
c Take a full backup of the VirtualCenter 2.x database. See your database documentation.
d Back up the VirtualCenter 2.x SSL certificates. See “Back Up VirtualCenter 2.x,” on page 43.
The downtime required for this upgrade is based on the amount of data in the database. During this time,
you cannot perform provisioning operations, such as cloning or creating virtual machines. The upgrade
from VirtualCenter 2.5 is faster in comparison to the upgrade from VirtualCenter 2.0.x because of
differences in changes to the database schema and the amount of data migration.
After the upgrade, the ESX hosts are automatically reconnected to vCenter Server 4.0. Your VMware High
Availability (HA) and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) clusters are automatically
reconfigured. (Check to ensure that the automatic reconfiguration is successful. In some cases, you might
need to reconfigure the clusters manually.)
For a detailed description of the upgrade procedure, see Chapter 5, “Preparing for the Upgrade to vCenter
Server,” on page 37 and Chapter 6, “Upgrading to vCenter Server 4.0,” on page 45.
2 Install the vSphere Client.
You can install the vSphere Client on the same machine with your previous version of the VI Client. You
must have the previous version of the VI Client to connect to previous versions of VirtualCenter and
ESX/ESXi.
For a detailed description of the procedure, see “Upgrade to the vSphere Client,” on page 56.
3 If your environment has vCenter Converter, upgrade it to the latest version.
4 If your environment has vCenter Guided Consolidation, complete the consolidation plan and then
upgrade it to the latest version.
5 If your environment has vCenter Update Manager, upgrade it to the latest version.
Procedure
1 Add ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0 host to vCenter Server 4.0.
vSphere Upgrade Guide
22 VMware, Inc.