We are migrating a physical vCenter Server for Windows to the VCSA but are having difficulty in interpreting the prerequisites. The vCenter Server and hosts are running vSphere 5.1. The vCenter Server will first be upgraded to 5.5 as this is a prerequisite for the migration. But what is the minimum version of the managed ESXi hosts?
According to the faq (FAQ: Migrating vCenter Server 5.5 to vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 U2m (2146439) | VMware KB) the minimum vSphere version needs to be 5.5 for the vCenter Server but there is nothing mentioned for the ESXi hosts managed by the vCenter Server. This implies that the product interoperability matrix is leading (VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes). However, the migration guide has a section 'Prepare Managed ESXi Hosts for Migration' stated the minimum ESXi version for the managed ESXi hosts needs to be 5.5.
Product Interoperability Matrix
Migration Guide Section
We put this out on twitter and got a response for William Lam reffering to the migration faq and that it is a migration of the vCenter Server and not the ESXi hosts. I did reply with the secion of the migration guide but did not get an answer back.
We have performed the migration on a lab environment and found no issues, as expected, when the managed ESXi hosts are running 5.1. We would like to now if we are interpreting the section in the migration guide wrong or if the migration guide section is indeed true or not.