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aha_tom
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Limitation of vCenter 5.1 with ESXi 4.1 hosts

We upgrade our cluster's vCenter from 4.1 to 5.1 standard recently. But all the hosts are still in ESXi 4.1U1. Everything works so far. The hosts are still using the vSphere 4.1 Enterprise Plus license we have. I just want to understand what kind the limitation we will have with such deploy. What's the main difference between a vCenter 5.1 cluster with ESXi 4.1 hosts and ESXi 5.1 hosts?

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JCMorrissey
Expert
Expert

Hi,

From working a 5.x vcenter environment for the past 6 months and having a few 4.x clusters haven't noticed any limitations as well to be honest.

Take a look at yellow-bricks HA/DRS URL http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/ - the interesting piece relates to the new vsphere FDM agent under the basic's section which is new.

regards

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jdptechnc
Expert
Expert

You're not really going to be limited in functionality (individually, the hosts are only going to have 4.x features of course).  But running a 4.x cluster in vCenter 5.x should be fine.  I wouldn't leave a mixed version cluster out there long term, but you can even run different host versions in the same cluster as part of your upgrade/migration plan, I've done this a few times.

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