I found something interesting in the VMware Forums:

“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.”

It appears that there is going to be a new upgrade path that will eliminate downtime for customers. This is very interesting! One of the biggest drawbacks to upgrading from 2.5.X to 3.0 is the scheduled downtime.

One has to wonder though, how does this compete with Vizioncore’s esxMigrator? I’m not sure how Vizioncore is going to spin this. When VMware released Consolidated Backup they claimed it was not a competitor to esxRanger. Instead they released a white paper talking about using both in kind of a “1 - 2″ punch. The whitepaper proposed using Consolidated Backup for file-level backup, and esxRanger to backup the .vmdk files as a single file.

Now, it almost seems like VMware is squeezing out Vizioncore….

You can read the thread at:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=51755

To learn more about esxMigrator:

http://www.vizioncore.com/esxMigrator.html