I just started as a Systems/Network Admin at a manufacturing plant. The old system admin quit after being on the verge of being fired for not completing his job duties. Basically what happened is a physical box, running RAID5 handling as their FSMO role holder for ADDS, and vCenter 5.0 server crashed. There were no backups (luckily secondary DC was in place for AD), and the data was not recoverable from the broken RAID. (I KNOW!!!! What did I get into?...)
It's a relatively complex setup, two hosts running ESXi 5.0 in a cluster, with HA, Vmotion setup, and DRS enabled at a minimum. These are attached to a Dell Equalogic SAN using an iSCSI connection.
Im rebuilding the DC that failed with RAID1 running solely as a secondary DC, nothing else (this will never happen again!).
I'm planning on spinning up a new VM on VM01, and running that dedicated as a vCenter server. What steps should I take to safeguard myself against any failures, or problems I may run into? Also, can I install vCenter 5.5, and add the VM01/02 hosts to this without any issues, or should I stick with vCenter 5.0 for now? Thanks!
edited for typo
