ESX Host Upgrade in a VDI POC Environment

[caryers]

Hello View Community:

I currently have a small 4 ESX server environment. My vCenter, connection, and secuirty servers are all VMs. I will be replacing these 4 - 6 year old ESX servers with much newer hardware(Faster, more RAM, etc) running the same exact ESX verison. The vCenter verison will not change simply the ESX host. With that said, what would be the upgrade path for this VDI scenario? I have done this upgrade before in a non-VDI VMWare environment with Win2k3 & Win2k8 server VMs. The unknowns in this VDI environment is the linked clones we use and the critical replica and Src objects which are the foundation of linked clones. The 6 year old servers are AMD processors and the new servers are Intel, so using vMotion is not an option. I am thinking I would simply have to do a remove from inventory and then add to inventory on the new ESX servers.

However, can this be done with repliace and source objects?

I noticed the only commands for the replica objects are "Clone to new Virtual Machine". However, the source-lc object has the commands of "Edit Settings", Migrate, "Clone to new Virtual Machine" & "Convert to template". So it appears I could do a remove and re-add to inventory for the source object. However, I don't know if that will technical work.

Any suggestions or your experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance...

Scott

[idle-jam]

check this out: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1015292

[caryers]

Great document. However, it refers to migrating to source and repliacas to the new ESX host. In my scenario, I don't have that option since my CPUs in the older and newer ESX servers are not alike.

[idle-jam]

you can try joining the both hosts to a single vcenter and then do a cold (shut down the VM) migration.

[caryers]

So you are saying once I follow that document by un-write protecting the repliace and source objects, I will then have the "Edit Settings" on the command on the Repliace to remove from inventory and then re-add to inventory on new ESX Host?