vSphere Essentials upgrade from 4.1 to 5.5 and move to vCenter Appliance

[keithbeeby]

Hi,

I'm in the process of planning to upgrade from vSphere Essentials 4.1 to 5.5.

Currently I run vCenter on Windows 2008 R2 but want to remove the complexity and OS licensing costs associated and thus deploy vCenter Appliance instead

I know you can't migrate my old vCenter settings to the new 5.5 vCenter Appliance.

So whats the process to move to the 5.5 vCenter Appliance?

1) Shutdown old vCenter Windows VM

2) Startup 5.5 vCenter Appliance and set with same IP as old vCenter VM

3) Configure vCenter Appliance adding in the existing 4.1 hosts (not sure if I have to remove the hosts from the original Windows VCenter as the 1st task?)

4) Apply 5.5 new licensing for vCenter + hosts (maybe the old 4.1 hosts won't accept the 5.5 licensing until upgraded?)

5) Upgrade hosts

6) Update VMWare Tools

Any help on the correct approach would be much appreciated

Thanks

Keith

[a_p_]

The steps sound good to me. You don't need to disconnect/detach the hosts from the "old" vCenter Server and the 4.1 CPU licenses should be imported with adding the hosts to the new vCenter Appliance, so all you need to do is to add the new 5.x license keys for the upgrade.

Before you start upgrading the hosts, ensure your hardware is supported/compatible with the new ESXi version.

André

[admin]

There are a lot of migration scripts out there, for example:

http://daverdave.com/node/130

You will of course need to thoroughly test them and maybe adept the cmdlets for 5.5 a bit but a whole lot of this can actually be automated.