Hi all,
Our main office environment is ESXi 5.1 / vCenter 5.1 / shared storage (fiber channel). And we have a remote office that's running 2 hosts on ESX 3.5 with their own shared storage (fiber channel), managed by a separate vCenter Server 4.0.
We purchased new servers and a new storage array to replace the hardware at the remote office. We want to add the new servers to the existing vCenter 5.1 farm (separate cluster since they're in a different city) with the VMs moved over to the new SAN.
Here is my plan for accomplishing this --
1. Install ESXi 5.1 on the new servers.
2. Add the new 5.1 hosts to vCenter 5.1, in a separate cluster.
3. Mount the existing SAN (where the VMs reside) to the new hosts.
4. Mount the new SAN to the new hosts only.
5. In vCenter 4.0, power off the VMs, unregister from inventory.
6. In vCenter 5.1, register the VMs into inventory, then power on.
7. Perform storage vMotion of the VMs, to move their VMDKs from the old SAN to the new SAN.
8. Shut down old hosts and old SAN.
Will this work as I expect? Is it safe to mount the same datastore to ESX 3.5 and ESXi 5.1 hosts at the same time? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
