SAN upgrade

Hello, Dan.

How you will upgrade to new hosts will change depending on if you are upgrading the Protected side, the Recovery side, or both. To start, please see page 278 of the ZVM Administration Guide, Managing Protection During VMWare Host Maintenance. We will use these same processes for replacing your hosts. This will require having some crossover over when old and new hosts are online.

■ For a host machine on the protected site: Remove affinity rules for protected virtual machines on the host that requires maintenance and vMotion these machines to any other host with a VRA installed. You can either move them directly to a new host you have set up, or move them to another old host and replace the original host with a new one before moving them back.

■ For a host machine on the recovery site: We will use the Changing a Recovery VRA process on page 275 of the above linked Administration Guide, with the same transfer rules of the above directions. Either go directly to a newly set up host, or to another old one temporarily before being sent to the new one that replaces the original.

■ For a host machine that is both protected and recovery: You will do both above steps, we suggest first vMotioning the protected VMs, and then Changing the Recovery VRA for recovery VPGs on the host.

Please also make sure you are also checking the Zerto Interoperability Matrix to make sure the versions of vCenter and ESXi are compatibile with your version of Zerto.

Does this information help?

Thank you for that information.  For this project will will be working only with the protected site.

Would I:

1. Move the VRA VM itself to host B, upgrade host A, then move the VRA back to host A?  Or…
2. Delete the VRA from host A, upgrade VMware on host A, then re-install the VRA after VMware on host A has been upgraded?

I think it makes more sense to move the VRA, upgrade, and move the VRA back.  Just wanted to check with the experts first.

Thanks!

Dan,

You will not be moving the VRA’s VM itself, the VMs you would be moving are the VMs in VPGs that are stored on the host. Once everything is off of the host, you can uninstall the VRA and replace the host. Then, you install a VRA on the new host, and move any protected VMs back.

Am I correct in reading your situation that you are physically replacing hosts? Or are you only upgrading existing hosts to a new version of ESXi?

Thank you.

Ok, thank you very much.  We are not replacing the physical hosts; just upgrading the version of ESXi.

I apologize for the confusion! You should be able to follow the documentation as provided, then. Do you have any further questions?

I just double-checked with my partner.  While the physical host hardware is not changing, he said we are not performing any ESXi upgrades.  Since we are moving to a new SAN and rebuilding the boot volume, we are essentially rebuilding the host from ground up.

That being said I think I will want/need to delete the VRA and deploy a new one on the upgraded rebuilt host.  Does that sound correct?

That does sound correct, yes.