Migrating to VI3 with no Downtime

According to all of the information circulating out there, we know that VMware ESX Server is heavily deployed throughout the world. And because of that, one of the first questions that we asked ourselves after the VI3 announcement was made and the excitement wore down was "how do we migrate our existing infrastructure?"

According to Damian Murdoch, VMware expert and owner of ozvms.com, "It has been a pain point since VI3 was first announced that customers would have to plan for downtime to perform the upgrade. This meant complex plans for outages that dragged out over a large timeframe."

But a solution to this pain point could be out sooner than we think. Damian received information about a new VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 release that could solve this problem. He was told "the upgrade path in the ESX 3.0.1 release will significantly reduce the upgrade downtime in going from an ESX 2.x to ESX 3.x environment for customers using VirtualCenter. Using VMotion and Relocate, customers will be able to migrate their ESX 2 | VMFS 2 virtual machines to the new ESX 3 | VMFS 3 environment one at a time without any downtime."

In addition to bug fixes, the new ESX 3.0.1 update is also supposed to include:

• Added support for selected 64-bit guest operating systems


• Support for servers based on the AMD 2000/8000 series processors as well as the Intel Xeon 7100 series of processor


• Support for Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) on Microsoft Windows XP virtual machines


• Support for iSCSI arrays such as EqualLogic PS300 and NetApp FAS3000

We'll have to wait for the official release and announcement from VMware, but it looks like this minor dot release will bring a lot of added benefit to VI3 users.

Posted by David Marshall on August 26, 2006 08:31 AM