migrating from 5.1 to 5.5 on new hardware

[evenbiggerfish]

hello all.

seeking advice on the options available to migrate from a hp chassis using a mixture of diff generation blades to a new chassis running gen 8 blades with a new Vcenter 5.5 install. storage is also different. moving from dell eql to NetApp. obvious concerns are switch configurations and minimizing downtime.

help greatly appreciated !

thanks in anticipation

dave

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

there might be several ways to migrate the VMs. However, what to do may depend on the size of the environment and the available supported configurations. If e.g. the "old" hosts support the new storage system, you may consider to temporarily connect them to the new storage system and the new vCenter Server to be able to use Storage vMotion (or Clod Migration) to migrate the VM's to the new storage system.

André

[evenbiggerfish]

Thanks for that. What about retaining settings in the 5.1. Database .? Was thinking of distributed switches etc would not have the time to set everything up again as the migration window is only at weekends !

dave

[a_p_]

From your initial post I understood that you wanted to do a new vCenter Server install. Anyway, you can also upgrade the existing vCenter Server to keep all settings and historical data, and add the new hosts to this instance.

André

[vNEX]

Hi,

in-place upgrade will retain all of your data and settings but sometimes didn't work as expected

so in case you will be forced to migrate your existing data refer to these articles:

VMware KB: Moving the VMware vCenter Server 4.x/5.x SQL database 

VMware KB: Migrating the vCenter Server database from SQL Express to full SQL Server 

VMware KB: Moving a vCenter Server Oracle database to another host server 

VMware KB: Exporting/importing/restoring Distributed Switch configs using vSphere Web client 

For just upgrade option see:

VMware KB: Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.5 best practices 

VMware KB: Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.5 on a Microsoft Windows platform using the Simple Install ...

Regards,

P.

[evenbiggerfish]

ap

yes it is a new build on new upgraded hardware from 5.1 to 5.5. all the settings and vm's need to be moved / retained on the new vsp 5.5 environment. all hardware is new including the storage which is also a new vendor, netapp.

these are production servers and must be available monday morning so only a short window to migrate / test services over the weekend.

the old environment has 10 blades and has only 1gb storage left. also some of the blades are not compatible with 5.5 as they are so old. so upgrading the old environment and doing a inplace upgrade, adding the new blades / storage and decommissioning the old is difficult as resources are insufficient.

dave