Hello,
I'm planning to upgrade vSphere farm 4.1 to 5.5. and, at the same time, replacing the HW used in vSphere 4.1.
The approach, we are evaluating, is to perform a fresh installation of the vSphere 5.5 on the new HW (hosts and storage) and later migrate VMs from 4.1 farm to 5.5. At the end, old farm (HW + vSphere 4.1) will be decommissioned. In my opinion one of the advantage (in a production environment) is to set-up 5.5 farm with non interaction and no impact to the 4.1 production farm, limiting the risks of an upgrade in place.
Could it a valid approach to upgrade the farm and, in the same time, replace the HW? or are there other suggested ways for upgrading&refreshing?
Someone also know how move (if possible) VMs between different farms (4.1 to 5.5) with no VMs downtime, as for vMotion in a single farm?
Any help or opinion is appreciated.
Many thanks in advance.
Giovanni.
Welcome to the Community - That is a very common approach in doing an upgrade - in the simplest steps your build your new environment with a new vCenter making sure the new ESXi hosts can see the existing data stores - once it is up and running you then one at a time add the 4.1 ESXi hosts to the new vSphere 5.5. environment vmotioning the VMs to the new ESXi 5.5 hosts -
This process is spelled in the VMware's UPgrade Guide - http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-55-upgrade...
Thank you for your answer.