5.0 ---> 6.0 : Upgrade or Migrate?

[csdiego]

Hello,

Having a hard time deciding which path to take. Current environment:

Single HP C7000 blade chassis with 4 blades connected to an HP P2000 G3 SAN. ESXi 5 hosts and vcenter Server 5.

Bought 3 new Gen9 blades and a new HP MSA 2042 SAN. Goal is to upgrade to 6.0U2 and eventually 6.5

The VMWare environment is simple - just HA features. All existing hosts are mapped to all datastores.

Seems to me creating a brand new Vcenter 6 server on the new blades/new storage and just migrating the VMs over would be the easiest route. Would you consider an in place upgrade in this case at all? Thanks for any guidance!

[rcporto]

If you don't care about historical data from your old vCenter and there is no other components accessing that vCenter installation, my recommendation will be deploy a new vCenter with your brand new hosts, move the old hosts to the new vCenter and then migrate the virtual machines to the new hosts.

Keep in mind that if you choose vCenter 6.0 Update 3, you will not be able to add vSphere ESXi hosts at version 5.0 to that vCenter based on VMware Intetorepability: VMware Product Interoperability Matrices