Impact of migrating hosts with vDS Nexus1000V to new vCenter?

[Nelsom]

Hi,

I am planning to upgrade my current vCenter 4.1 / ESX 4.x / vDS 4.0 Nexus1000V environment to vCenter 5.0 / ESXi5 / vDS5 Nexus1000V.

Planned upgrade steps

A. install new vCenter 5 vm, using a fresh database

B. shut down old vCenter 4 Server and old database server

C. add ESX 4.x hosts to new vCenter 5

D. upgrade ESX 4.x hosts one by one to ESXi5

E. upgrade vDS to version 5 (?)

The old vSphere 4 environment is using all vDS 4.0, the new vSphere 5 environment eventually will use vDS 5.

My questions

1. what will happen to the old vDS when adding the hosts one by one to the new vCenter 5? Will I lose the vDS configuration? Or is it imported  by the new vCenter 5?
2. is there an impact on the vms running on the ESX4 hosts related to the vDS migration/recreation? Downtime? Missed pings?
3. do I need to first create vDS version 4.0 since initially I will have ESX 4.x hosts in my vCenter 5?

Thanks,

Nelsom.

[marcelo_soares]

You will need to first remove the ESX Servers from Nexus (removing the VEM module), setup the network communication using standard vSwitches and only after that shutting down the vCenter 4 and setting up a new vCenter. I really think only shutting down the actual vcenter will not be a good idea if you have Nexus on it. Or, you can upgrade the actual vCenter to the version 5 keeping the actual structure and upgrading host by host, checking before the compatibility of the VSM and VEM version you are using to the new ones.

[aravinds3107]

Welcome to the Community..

Check Migrating to a new vCenter Server with the Cisco Nexus 1000v vDS for some information

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere-vnetwork-ds-migration-configuration-wp.pdf