New PowerEdge R900 purchased

[pearlyshells]

We have recently acquired a PowerEdge R900. It is VT compliant and has hardware on the ESX HAL. We are already an ESX3.5 environment with a few R900's in ESX3.5 HA/DRS clusters and some 2950s also in a separate HA/DRS cluster. We have VirtualCenter2.5 Update 6.

This new server isn't really needed at this time for any specific reason BUT I would like to install vSphere4 on it and introduce it into our 3.5 environment (I realize it won't be a functional vSphere4 server until VirtualCenter and the rest of the ESXHosts are upgraded but I wanted to have it already in the environment as a standalone host for the time being). Do you see any issues doing this?

[weinstein5]

There will be no issues - it will be a fully functional ESX 4 hosts = upi jyuect will not be able to manage it with virtual center until you upgrade it to vCenter 4.0 - also pleas enote two things:

1. You will need to use the vSphere management client to manage the new ESX hosts

2. If you are note aware your can actually manage your existing environment with vCenter 4.0 -

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[TomHowarth]

As long as it is stand alone and managed by the vCenter 4.0 client you should be fine, you will not be able to add this server to a cluster or manage it via your vCenter server. however if you upgraded your vCenter to v4.0 you would be able to manage both your vSphere and your 3.5 environments.

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Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author on "[VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment|http://www.amazon.co.uk/VMware-VSphere-Virtual-Infrastructure-Security/dp/0137158009/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256146240&sr=1-1]”.