Upgrading from 5.1 to 5.5

[tmillcon]

Greetings,

I am the network administrator at a medium size school district.  We have a small VMware environment consisting of 3 hosts running ESXi 5.1 and Vcenter appliance 5.5.  I will be replacing the hosts with two new hosts with much more memory and processing power.  They are all Dell Poweredge servers.  My game plan is to add the new 5.5 hosts to the existing cluster, vmotion all of the VM’s to the new boxes and then remove the old servers from the cluster.  I recently upgraded the Vcenter appliance to except the new 5.5 hosts.

My question is will I have any issues adding a host with much newer hardware to the cluster? Any insight or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks in Advance

[Anjani_Kumar]

There are some things you need to consider before.

1. check if the host cpu family are different then must configure the evc mode in your entire cluster. Else create a new cluster under same datacenter, add your new host in to that and then start migrating the vm in to them. it will save your time for the evc config

2. Share the same datastores to every host so you can get your vm storage vmotion everywhere..

The best practice./

add your host in to the same datacenter in a new cluster and start doing all the configuration and test with some test vm to see if those are okay while vmotion, HA,DRS, Storage vmotion. and if its success move all the workload in to your new cluster via vmotion.

[Kauy]

You might also want to check whether the new hardware is compatible with ESXi 5.5 on the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Cheers.