Possible to setup new vSphere 4 and migrate hosts from ESX 3.5?

[nyplnyc]

The upgrade path makes me nervous (am I being too paranoid?).

Anyway, I have enough hardware and SAN storage to setup a new vSphere enviornment.

Is it feasible to setup a new and separate vSphere 4 enviornemnt and then migrate the hosts from the 3.5 enviornment? The doc alway start with upgrade VC to version 4 and be careful not to break stuff.....

[weinstein5]

Yes you are being paranoid - the reason they the recommendation to upgrade VC first, at least the way see it, is to maintain your existing virtual center environment- if you are willing to stand up a new vCenter 4.0 environment remove your 3.5 host from your virtual center 2.5 environment and add them to the new vCenter 4.0 since vCenter 4.0 can manage both 3.5 and 4.0 esx servers -once they are over you will be able to upgrade the hosts to 4.0 and VMotion the vms over tot he esx 4.0 platforms - this can be accomplished with no down time - the time you will need to restart the vms is when your install the new version of VMware tools and upgrade to version 7 of the virtual hardware -

If you want to give in to your paranoia - yes you can build a brand new vSphere - zone your SAN so the new hosts can see the LUNs holding your VMs - power them off and remove them form the old inventory - once removed add them to the new vSphere environment and power them on -

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[brettparlier · Accepted solution]

I actually finished up a project a few days ago regarding this. I removed the VM's from the old inventory, moved LUN's with the old VM's to the storage group for the new environment and added them to the new inventory. Of course if you are not going to be using the same storage it will be more in depth, but it certainly can be done. The plan was to do what weinstein mentioned in his post, as far as adding the old hosts to the new VC, but I move the LUN's first and had to finish up the way I did. It went smoothly and I haven't had any problems with the VM's yet.