ESX 3.5 to vSphere 5 Migration with Veeam

[mplep]

Hi,

I have the opportunity to utilise Veeam Backup & Replication for a migration which I would appreciate some advice on please. The customer has an ESX 3.5 Enterprise FC-SAN environment which is being replaced with ESXi 5 Enterprise SAS-SAN. The storage is separate between the two environments. The vCenter instance is also separate between them, but they share a LAN (1GB) connection. I need to migrate several of the VMs from ESX 3.5 onto ESXi 5 without having a direct relationship between the storage whilst minimizing downtime.

Is the following a viable solution:

Install a Veeam Proxy Agent onto a VM upon ESX 3.5 and ESXi 5 host
Setup Replication job(s) from ESX to ESXi
Await for Replication seeding to complete (can leave running during business hours)
Power off ESX 3.5 VMs (at weekend)
Run Replication again (grab clean power off VM state)
Delete Replication job
Power on ESXi 5 VMs
Upgrade VM tools & Virtual Machine Hardware

I am aware of the "Quick Migration" feature, but thought the above steps would give more control of timings.

Any comments would be appreciated

MPLEP

[dellock6]

You can use Replica Failover to switch to the replicated VM. About the timing, you cannot schedule this job via GUI but you can do it via PowerShell.

Luca.

[deduplicat3d]

I did this same procedure 3.5U2->5.0

I also used replica, in order to time it better. I used multiple replica jobs to make it even a little easier. You can do all of this through the GUI.

One thing to consider is that 3.5 is a little finicky with hotadd, so if it doesn't work it's a little slower. And obviously 3.5 does not support CBT. So just remember the jobs from 3.5 to 5.0 aren't going to be blazing fast.

If you are going to be upgrading the tools, one easy thing to do while you're at it is to upgrade to the vmxnet3 vnic.