vCenter 5.0.0 to 5.5 upgrade

[ed93105]

Hi,

We are starting to plan an upgrade of our vmware environment.

We currently have this in place:

vCenter Server Standard 5.0 on a Windows 2008 R2 vm running MS SQL 2008

30 esxi 5.0.0 Enterprise Plus hosts, mainly Dell R620s

90 vms mainly redhat and some windows server 2008 and 2012.

We are thinking of upgrading to

vCenter 5.5 on Windows server 2012 and MS SQL 2012

After this is done, upgrade all esxi hosts to 5.5 enterprise plus

Any opinions welcome, should we be doing things differently this time round? Maybe go for vcenter on linux applicance? Separate out the database to the vcenter?

Is it worth engaging vmware professional services for such an upgrade?

Thanks,

Ed

[rcporto]

Your environment is very simple and the upgrade looks like a very easy task because of this there is no need to involve the VMware Professional Services, just do this your self 🙂  And since your environment is small, to make things more easy I will recommend you just make the in-place upgrade to vCenter 5.5.

[admin]

I completely agree with Richard here...

In-place upgrade of vSphere is the best option, should be pretty straight forward.

Note: Make sure you take a good backup of your SQL Server and vCenter VM using backup tools or snapshot it before doing the upgrade.

Good luck!