Breaking Up an Existing Cluster into 2

[Kem80]

We currently have an 8 blade single cluster based on VMware ESXi 6.0 with Enterprise Plus licensing. All 8 blades are licensed to Windows Datacneter 2012 R2 licenses to allow us to create Windows 2012 R2 servers and allow vMotion.

With the requests for Windows 2016 servers on increase, we have purchased Windows 2019 Datacenter licenses for 3 of the 8 blades. So that we don't fall foul of Windows licensing we were planning split the existing cluster into two - a 5 blade cluster for exisiting Windows 2012 servers (and lower), and 3 blade cluster for new Windows 2016 servers.

Could someone kindly advise the necessary steps to take to split the current cluster without downtime? All the networking, switching and shared storage will remain the same for both clusters, we are just want to create a division between the Windows 2012 (and below) and new Windows 2016.

Or can anybody suggest a better route or a better way to achieve this? The likelihood is that we will buy Windows 2019 licenses for the rest of the blades, but that will be sometime next financial year.

Thanks

[dbalcaraz]

Well, if you are going to preserve all settings, you just have to remove the ESXi host from the cluster and then add it to the new one.

Just remember to configure the new cluster as you want (DRS, HA, FT, etc.)

This thing can be done without any problem if you don't have any particular configuration (SR-IOV or something like that).

[flynmooney]

Another thing when making the new cluster is the EVC mode.

Not relating to you since you said you are running 6.0, but someone else might have this issue if they are using 6.5. We've see a few times in 6.5 where a new cluster won't let in another server that should be able to run the same EVC mode but doesn't.  Temporarily disable EVC add the host and re-enable is how we've worked around this.

[Kem80]

Thanks for your response. I would believe that your suggestion is logical and would work, although I did get an error when trying to add one of the existing host to the new cluster. As this is potentailly only a temporary solution until we license up all the blades next year, I decided to configure DRS VM/Host affinity groups and rules against 3 nominated blades which will host all the Windows 2016 servers. It's simple and it works. Did try to move a 2016 server off the 3 blades which was tied to the rule and it would not let you, only allowed to move to the other 2 blades.

Thanks for your inputs