OnCommand Host 1.1 and vSphere upgrade

[BEN_KNIGHTS]

Hi all,

I'm lining myself up for an installation of OnCommand Host 1.1 to interface between OnCommand Core 5.0.1 and vSphere 4.0. However, this section of the release notes for the Host software doesn't fill me with confidence if we look to a vSphere upgrade in the future:

OnCommand Host Package now supports vSphere 5.0

Important: To avoid manual re-configuration of your dataset, ensure that vSphere 5.0 is installed on your vCenter server before you install OnCommand Host Package. If you install OnCommand Host Package and an earlier version of vSphere is installed on your vCenter server, you will need to manually re-configure your dataset when you upgrade to vSphere 5.0.

The following represents the impact of upgrading vCenter on installations of OnCommand Host Package.

• You conduct a new installation of vCenter 5.0 then install OnCommand Host Package 1.1.

Installing OnCommand Host Package in this way will not produce issues.

• You upgrade vCenter 4.x to vCenter 5.0 then install OnCommand Host Package. Installing OnCommand Host Package in this way will not produce issues.

• You install OnCommand Host Package on a server running vCenter 4.x then upgrade vCenter 4.x to vCenter 5.0. This will produce NFS failures.

• Existing datasets with NFS entities will fail.

• Existing datasets with mix NFS and VMFS entities will be partial failures.

• Existing NFS backups are no longer usable.

The ESX servers have 100% NFS presented datastores and the release notes offer no solution to work around this issue (or even why this behaviour should present itself following the upgrade).

Anyone come across this issue during an upgrade or have any details of how to work around it?

We're currently using SMVI 2.0 for VM backups and I'm implementing SnapVault, hence the installation of OnCommand Host as this drives everything from Ops Manager, including the ability to SnapVault following VM backup.

Thanks,

Ben.

[salindley]

I'm in exactly the same boat - vSphere 4.x, looking to upgrade to 5.x sometime in the not too distant future. The release notes mention that there will be issues and you will have to manually re-configure datasets, but there's no mention of how to avoid this, or if it's unavoidable, what will need to be done to the datasets in order to "re-configure" them. Is this a complete re-baseline (ick! I don't have infinite storage!), or is there a way to "re-connect" the backups? I'm none too happy with the statement that this will cause problems with no more details than are given, as if it was "no big deal". Has anyone actually done this, or are Ben and I the guinea pigs? I need to know BEFORE I take a major backup hit. We've already experienced enough disappointments with the "upgrade" to OCHP (for example, the inability to do filesystem-object-level restores, which was present in SMVI - so I am told). OCHP has been sort of flaky and overcomplicated, now we're being told there will be an issue if we upgrade to vSphere 5.0, with no mitigation procedures or any real information about the impact.

Has anyone out there actually done this upgrade, and what was the impact and mitigation?