Kem80
Contributor
Contributor

Breaking Up an Existing Cluster into 2

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

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