Migration from vSphere 5 to 6

[vemery999]

Hi,

I want to replace/upgrade 3 nodes ESXi 5 (IBM System X) to 2 nodes ESXi 6 (HP Proliant).

There is NetApp Shared Storage and vCenter 5 standard

1) Upgrade vCenter 5 standard to vCenter server 6 standard

2) Deploy ESXi 6 to the both HP Proliant nodes and add it to the vCenter server

3) Create a new clusters with the both ESXi 6 nodes and new datastore

3) vMotion (change both host and datastore) between the ESXi5 cluster to the ESXi 6 cluster.

Is this upgrade path possible?

Is there someting wrong?

Question: I Have to upgrade to vSphere 5.5 before be able to vmotion (host and storage) to vsphere 6 ?

Thanks for your advise

Vincent

[rcporto]

If your new hosts have different CPU you may have problems to vMotion the virtual machines... if you got this problem and to avoid a long downtime, you can map the old datastores to the new cluster and shutdown the virtual machines, migrate (changing only host) the virtual machines to the new host and then power on the virtual machines again. Once the new virtual machines are running on the new cluster you can do a storage vMotion to the new datastores.

[vemery999]

Hi,

thanks for your answer. The CPU family is the same on both cluster, but the generation technology change since 4 years....

Intel Xeon E5645 for the IBM servers and Intel Xeon E5-2650v3 for the HP servers. I have to check this point. Thanks

About the difference of the version of ESXi: Is it possible to vMotion (Host and storage) from cluster 5 to cluster 6 ? Or I have to upgrade to 5.5 before ?

Another way (if cpu is not an issue) to migrate could be to upgrade the IBM cluster to 6, then add the two new HP to the same cluster, vMotion (host only, not storage), and finaly remove the IBM boxes from the cluster.

Thanks for your advise.

Vincent