vSphere 5.5 - Migrate to new hardware and upgrate to v7.0

[magnogandorini]

Hello everyone,

We are migration our VMware infrastructure and we're hoping you could help us with the best practices and/or best path to follow for our case.

Right now, we are running v5.5 which is outdated and to update to the newest version, we need newer hardware. At the moment, we have the following:

2 Cluster with 2 hosts each - 1 cluster for production and the other essentially for testing

2 datastores - 1 faster storage for most important VMs and 1 slower storage but with more space for other VMs

Essentially, this is a little overcomplicated for our needs since we also migrated a few services to cloud/SaaS, so the new infrastructure will have only 1 cluster with 2 hosts and 1 datastore.

So, as you can see, we will be using new servers, new datastores, and we also need to upgrade from 5.5 to 7.0.

Again, and what be the best practices and how is the best way to do this?

Thank you.

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

Install on a Veeam B&R physical machine and use the l'utility Quick migration.
On veeam you have to hook up vcenter 5.5 and vcenter 7.0 and then migrate the vm from source to target.

another solution is to hook up an iscsi NAS on 5.5 environment to copy the VMs hook it to the new 7.0 environment and copy the VMs to the new datastore.

...finally remember to update the vmware tools and hardware compatibility.

regards,

Alex_Romeo

[magnogandorini]

Hi Alex,

Thank you for your reply.

Just to confirm, if I follow through with the Veeam route, I can configure a fresh 7.0 environment with a new vCenter (I didn't mention but our current vCenter does have some issues, so it would be nice to have a new one freshly installed) and just migrate the VMs to the new hosts/datastore with Veeam, correct?

Thank you,

Best regards,

Magno

[IRIX201110141]

On paper a modern Veeam B&R will not support old ESXi 5.5.  I can say that i use this way in the past to migrate the VMs from old ESXi to new ESXi 7 by using the replication feature of Veeam. Plan "B" should be a normal backup when the VM is offline, update your Veeam to 11.x and than perform a (instant) restore to the new infrastructure.
This only makes fun when you have just a bunch of VMs. If you have dozens of VM think about upgrade the old 5.5 to 6.5 or deploy a vCenter 6.7 first or what ever it needs to manage ESXi 5.5.

I have little to no understanding for customers who think than performing not a single update in years would save a cent. If the ESXi would at least on 6.5 it can be managed by VCSA 7 and you can migrate with a simple mouse click by performing a svMotion.

Regards,
Joerg

[ptarnawski]

There is no direct path to upgrade your vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 7.0,

And if you have some issues with old environment, better off to set up new v 7.0

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/platform_support.html?ver=110

regards,

Alex_Romeo

[IRIX201110141]

Ah... thats why it working flawlessly 🙂

[magnogandorini]

Hi @IRIX201110141 @Alex_Romeo@ptarnawski ,

Thank you for you help on this. I'll be following with this method (test it out first when the servers arrive) and if/when everything is done, i'll give you all some feedback.

Thanks once again.

Best regards,

Magno