Live Migration via HCX with in DC (vSphere upgrade)

[sureshsiwach]

Hello All,

I hope you are doing good. I need your advice. I have to Upgrade vSphere 5.5 to 6.5 with in data center. In current infra approx 70% of hardware is out of life/support. New infra which i am supposed to receive will have different CPU class so I will be requiring the downtime for approx every VM in ordinary vSphere upgrade process. To avoid downtime i want to use VMware HCX. My concern is "can i use VMware HCX as on premises to on permisis or on prem to cloud and then on prem? Would it be recommended method? Please share if you have any another thought/ idea about same. I am looking forward for your reply.

Thanks

Suresh Siwach

[daphnissov]

If your incoming, new hardware is using CPUs that are more capable than your existing, out-of-life hardware, you should not incur any downtime for vMotion migrations from old to new hardware provided you're going from like to like architectures (ex., Intel to Intel). Using HCX in this case is way overkill and dramatically complicates what would otherwise be a fairly simple upgrade. Your process should probably go something like:

1. Deploy new compute.
2. Upgrade/deploy vCenter from 5.5 to 6.5
3. Install target version of ESXi and bring to desired patch rev.
4. Configure shared storage per design.
5. With 5.5 and new 6.5 hosts joined to the 6.5 vCenter, migrate workloads from old to new.
6. Decommission old 5.5 compute hardware.
7. With all VMs on 6.5 environment, upgrade VMware Tools.
8. Upgrade virtual hardware level.