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GiovanniC
Contributor
Contributor

upgrade vSphere 4.1 to 5.5 with HW refresh

Hello,

I'm planning to upgrade vSphere farm 4.1 to 5.5. and, at the same time, replacing the HW used in vSphere 4.1.

The approach, we are evaluating, is to perform a fresh installation of the vSphere 5.5 on the new HW (hosts and storage) and later migrate VMs from 4.1 farm to 5.5. At the end, old farm (HW + vSphere 4.1) will be decommissioned. In my opinion one of the advantage (in a production environment) is to set-up 5.5 farm with non interaction and no impact to the 4.1 production farm, limiting the risks of an upgrade in place.

Could it a valid approach to upgrade the farm and, in the same time, replace the HW? or are there other suggested ways for upgrading&refreshing?

Someone also know how move (if possible) VMs between different farms (4.1 to 5.5) with no VMs downtime, as for vMotion in a single farm?

Any help or opinion is appreciated.

Many thanks in advance.

Giovanni.

2 Replies
weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome to the Community - That is a very common approach in doing an upgrade - in the simplest steps your build your new environment with a new vCenter making sure the new ESXi hosts can see the existing data stores - once it is up and running you then one at a time add the 4.1 ESXi hosts to the new vSphere 5.5. environment vmotioning the VMs to the new ESXi 5.5 hosts -

This process is spelled in the VMware's UPgrade Guide - http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-55-upgrade...

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GiovanniC
Contributor
Contributor

Thank you for your answer.

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