Hi,
Can I please run the following past people here to get opinions on how you think it may turn out..
Basically, I'm planning a vCenter 5.1 upgrade from a vCenter 4.1 installation, but I'm not wanting to upgrade in place due to my being uncomfortable with the 4.1 -> 5.1 upgrade instability.
Instead, I've built a fresh vSphere 5.1 environment, including:
SSO
Inventory Service
VUM
vCenter
Web client
SRM
And it's all working with in-house certificates. SRM has paired up, datacentres have been created, OS customisations are in place, empty clusters have been created with the same EVC level, licenses have been imported, and it all looks good to go.
The next part is to import all the 4.1 ESXi hosts from their existing DRS,HA, EVC cluster which is also protected by SRM.
The problem though is that it should be done with no downtime to the hosts or the running VM's. The VM's are all running from NFS stores.
My plan is therefore:
Unprotect all SRM protected VM's (to delete SRM placeholders on NFS and placeholder VM's in vCenter)
Reconfigure clusters disabling DRS, HA (keeping EVC)
Remove cluster (hosts will revert to standalone? VM's will keep running?)
"remove" host from old vmware vcenter
add host to new vcenter
add host to new cluster
configure SRM
I can see from google, that other people have done this already, but does this sound sane?
I want to avoid downtime to the VM's at all costs, so placing the esxi hosts into maintenance mode isn't really an option. I therefore need to check that the above is possible, and that removing the cluster won't shutdown the running VM's or force some kind of hardware installation/panic on the VM's due to the EVC mode not being applied any more. The EVC mode would then be a bigger problem when trying to admit the hosts/vm's to the new cluster if the VM's have re-detected newer processor hardware...
Thanks in advance,
Rob.