Well the time has come. I have now been tasked with upgrading our ESX5.0 hosts to ESX5.5. Currently I have 10 ESX hosts but 6 of them are pretty old so im looking at introducing 4 new blades with 256Gb of ram and 2 x 6core CPU's and decomm the oldest ones.
Im going to pretty much keep the config of things like the vSwitches the same, we use DRS and our HA is ok. I want to take down the older ESX hosts one by one.. rebuild to 5.5 and update all the firmware etc on those hosts.
My question is... what would be the best way forward? New Environment and migrate or inplace upgrade?
One thing to point out though, I have a need to separate 3 of the hosts and manage them with a seperate vCenter Server (which i have a license sorted for and just need to build a new server) due to some external third party licensing issues.
I know its going to be a big job and I would really appreciate the assistance/guidance.
Im going to pretty much keep the config of things like the vSwitches the same, we use DRS and our HA is ok. I want to take down the older ESX hosts one by one.. rebuild to 5.5 and update all the firmware etc on those hosts.
My question is... what would be the best way forward? New Environment and migrate or inplace upgrade?
One thing to point out though, I have a need to separate 3 of the hosts and manage them with a seperate vCenter Server (which i have a license sorted for and just need to build a new server) due to some external third party licensing issues.
I know its going to be a big job and I would really appreciate the assistance/guidance.