VMware 4.0 to 5.0 Upgrade

Concluded a successful project in one of our prominent customers.

This was a practical scenario which involved following steps. The vSphere 4 was setup by a previous employee and it had to be upgraded to vSphere 5.

Pre assessment tasks involved.

• Taking an inventory of the vm's
• Taking an inventory of datastores.
• Taking an inventory of the vswitches, network adapters and their MAC addresses. There were VLAN's involved.
• IP details and DNS and netbios names.

Project Plan in a high level involved:

• Powering off non critical vm's
• vMotion vitual machines to single host.
• Installing ESXi 5on a host on two new HDD's.
• Configure ESXi host.
• Install vCenter Server 5 on a vm.
• Configure vCenter Server.
• Unregister vm's from old hypervisor and register new hypervisor.
• Upgrade the hardware version on vm's.
• Testing vm settings.
• Install ESXi 5 on the other host.
• Configure ESXi 5.
• Format and install vCenter Server 5 on the physical machine.
• Configure vCenter Server 5 and HA/DRS cluster.

The downtime was a 4 hour window. We achieved it within the given time.