upgrade vmware 5.0 u3 to 6.0

[avba]

We want to upgrade our environment from VMware 5.0 u3 to 6.0

1. Does anyone have that migration documents

2. What's the precautions we need to take for tha same

[DavoudTeimouri]

Hi,

You can upgrade your vCenter to vCenter 6.0 because it's compatible with ESXi 5.5 U3. Then you can upgrade your ESXi server.

[avba]

No It's not 5.5 u3 . It's 5.0 u3

[MKBA]

As from documentation

vSphere 6.0 Documentation Center

Direct upgrade from vcenter server 5.0 to 6.0 is not supported,first we need to upgrade to 5.1.x/5.5.x  but in case of esx direct upgrade methos is supported,see this KB for esx

VMware KB: Methods for upgrading to VMware ESXi 6.0

[avba]

Why it's not supported !!! It's supported by vmware. There are mwthods to do it.

[mcrape]

Have you checked out the vSphere Upgrade document - https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-60/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-60-upgrad...

Page 82 details the steps to upgrade from vCenter 5.0. I would encourage you to at least review the document though as there is a lot of good info in there.

[avba]

Thanks a lot. I'm reading the doc.

[avba]

Is it possible to upgrade environment from vmware 5.0 to 6.0 without downtime ?

[mcrape]

Depends on your environment; vCenter shouldn't be down that long and shouldn't affect the actual VMs running on the hosts.

Do you have things like SRM, VSAN, NSX, etc. running? What license level are you running? Are you able to upgrade the hosts one at a time by vMotioning the guests onto other hosts for the duration of the upgrade?

We really need to know more about your environment before anyone can give you a good answer.

[MKBA]

I am talking about upgrade from vmware vcenter serrver appliance 5.0 to 6.0 which is not supported,but windows vc of 5.0 to 6.0 is supported

[avba]

No we dont have SRM,VSAN or NSX etc.. We have almost 210 ESX host . Clusters are designed as per applications. We have 3 vcenter for dev, test and prod.

[avba]

Yes thanks, I'm talking about Windows VC 5.0 to 6.0

[avba]

We have hardware version 7 and 8 in our environment. But when we would be migrated to vmware 6.0 the hardware version would be 11 . So is vmotion is possible from vmware 5.0 to vmware 6.0 where the hardware version is different ?

Our approach is first we would upgrade vcenter to 6.0 then  we will introduce few ESX host of 6.0 to the existing cluster. Then vmotion some vms to the new hosts

is it realistic ?