Migrate From Esxi 5.5 to ESXi 6.5

[PS3ALI]

Hello ,

All our Esxi 5.5 are hosted in IBM Servers that not support Esxi 6.5 so i'm thinking how to migrate to 6.5 in this case and we know that te support End of Esxi 5.5  is 19 Sep 2018  .

What im planning is, to purshase a new server witch will be compatible to 6.5 version and then integrated to our Cluster (we have  one cluster ) and then migrate our VMs (this server will be for test in first step ) then , if the operation terminited in success i will purshase all servers and integrated one by one .etc...

what could be the points to study for this kind of migration  ?

Regards,

[diegodco31]

Hi

Check the following Upgrading / Migrating from vSphere 5.x to 6.x (6.5 , 6.7) best practices & Approach – Siva Sankar Bl...

[vijayrana968]

I would say, first choose the hardware platform vendor and then check the storage and networking compatibility of your existing setup.

You would also need to analyze compute resource requirements on performance point of view to decide what hardware will suit to your application. For example, Oracle databases you may wan't to setup Oracle recommended hardware fall under HCL. The study start from pre-requisites and analysis

[nileshm]

After you do all the hardware, storage, networking compatibility checks, make sure you have vcenter server 6.5 ready before you start host upgrades. Thanks!

[PS3ALI]

Thanks of you  .if all my prerequisites are done . could i manage all my 5.5 ESxi with New Vcenter 6.5 server .So the Vcenter 5.5 and 6.5 in the same time or should migrate to 6.5 first ?

Regards

[a_p_]

vCenter Server 6.5 supports ESXi 5.5 hosts (see VMware Product Interoperability Matrices), so start with upgrading to vCenter Server.

André

[nileshm · Accepted solution]

Yes, you can manage 5.5 hosts from 6.5 vcenter without any issues. Please refer these best practices. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147686 https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147548` There is one more aproach to this. You can build fresh 6.5 vcenter environment without touching your existing environment. Once your new 6.5 vcenter is ready, build 6.5 hosts on new hardware that you are planning to get. Add these hosts to 6.5 vcenter, make sure same storage and networks are visible to these hosts that are seen by 5.5 hosts. Plan a downtime and take your vms out of inventory from 5.5 host and register them on 6.5 hosts in new vcenter. You can simply write a powercli script to remove and register vms. This is a bit long method, but easy if you planned properly. Thanks

[RaspyBear]

This is a good answer and can't add more here.

[PS3ALI]

Thanks ; All the answers are good