vSphere5 on new hardware

[bulabog]

We will be replacing all our old hardware with new ones. In the process, we will also install vSphere 5 on the new hardware (and move all the VMs to the new hardware).

Do you guys have any recommendation as to the best way to achieve this? What we plan to do is set up a new environment using vsphere 5 on new hardware, present the storage to the new environment, register the VMs, then decommission the old environment (4.1). I was hoping to find out what the experts in the forum think about this.

Also, we are moving from AMD based hardware to INTEL based hardware. Are we going to experience any issues powering up the VMs that were originally on AMD?

Looking forward to your suggestions and replies. Thanks very much in advance.

[weinstein5]

What you propose sounds the right way to go since they wiill be seperate - since you are switching processor manaufacturers you will have to shut down the VMs to move them - there should be no issue with the Windows VMs - if you are running Linux you could run into issues if processor specific kernels ar ein use -

[bulabog]

Thanks... what sort of issues are we expecting with regards to the AMD to INTEL move. We run a mix of Windows and Linux so this looks like a major issue.

[weinstein5]

Windows there should be no issues. Theonly times I saw issues with Linux VMs moving between CPU manufacturer were machines created Linux experts who liked tweaking the installs of the kernels, so as long you went with the standard installs you should be fine. If you do run into issues in the migration you start the VM up on the AMD based host and research on how to resolve the problem - 

[bulabog]

thanks!