My apologies if I'm asking a FAQ, but I haven't seen this scenario posted yet...
I would like to move a three host cluster of ESX 4.0 servers from a VCenter 4 VM on that cluster to a VCenter 5 VM on a new four host VSphere 5 cluster, and upgrade the VCenter license to version 5. Preferably I would like to do this without VM downtime. The objective of this is to gradually migrate VMs from the ESX 4 cluster to VSphere 5 and upgrade the VCenter license to version 5. The old hardware is being taken out of service, therefore ESX 4 will not be upgraded. From what I gather, the process is:
1) Disconnect ESX 4 host from its current cluster.
2) Connect ESX 4 host to new VCenter.
3) Repeat 1 & 2 for second ESX 4 host.
4) Create new cluster on new VCenter and place the first two ESX 4 hosts in that cluster.
5) Disconnect final ESX 4 host from original cluster.
6) Connect final ESX 4 host to new cluster.
Questions:
* This shouldn't affect the licensing on the ESX4 hosts (Enterprise), should it? Will the licenses currently on the ESX4 servers stay with the migration or will their licenses need to be readded with the move to a new VCenter server?
* After the hosts are moved to the new cluster and VCenter, I will be migrating the virtual machines on them to the new VSphere 5 environment (Enterprise Plus). The hosts do not share common storage, as this is new hardware to replace hardware going out of production. Would cloning the VMs be best, or migrating via VCenter Converter? I don't want to actually move the VM over so that in case there's a problem, I can just turn the VM back up on the old cluster. The two clusters have different CPU vendors also (AMD on 4, Intel on 5).
Thanks!
