Upgrade vsphere 6.7 to 7 with vm MSCS

[pazzoide76]

HI,
I have a question about the vmware infrastructure upgrade which contains two microsoft failover clusters (MSCS)
Currently the infrastructure is based on vsphere 6.7 and I have to upgrade to version 7 latest build.
Reading the VMware Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service document, it says the following:
Mixed environments, such as configurations where one cluster node is running a different version of ESXi than another cluster node.
So I wanted to figure out how to proceed to upgrade the vsphere infrastructure causing as little disruption as possible (possibly without shutting down vm)
From what is written in the document it is not supported to have the vm of the cluster on hosts with different versions of esxi.
So to upgrade the infrastructure I have to shut down the vm that are part of the MSCS?

Thank you

Greetings

[Lalegre]

@pazzoide76,

I have worked in different environments with multiple SQL Clusters and if you perform the upgrade is more than probable that you face no impact at all. However, if you have a cluster and vMotion capability licenses, you can migrate your VMs (Depending if you are using RDM or not) to other free nodes meanwhile the upgrade is performed.

[pazzoide76]

Thanks for your answer.
The vms use RDM disks in physical mode but with vmotion I should be able to migrate them to another host.
My doubt is that at some point the vm's will be on a 6.7 host and on a 7.0.
And I would like to understand if this creates problems because in the vmware document it is written that the following configuration is not supported:
Mixed environments, such as configurations where one cluster node is running a different version of ESXi than another cluster node.

Thank you

Greetings

[Lalegre]

@pazzoide76,

Let´s wait for someone that may have faced this just in case.

But I believe this Mixed version indicates punctually to Shared VMDK vs Clustered VMDK that was introduced in vSphere 7 and should not be your case as you are using pRDM and there were no changes between versions. That, however, is my conclusion after reading some articles:

https://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2019/05/wsfc-on-vsphere.html

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147661

Hope someone can confirm if I am on the right path, otherwise, open a case with this information, and they may be able to give you more deep dive details.

[pazzoide76]

@Lalegrethanks for the reply.
I hope your conclusions are correct.
Let's wait for someone to confirm.

Thank you

Greetings