Kishwaukee
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Upgrade VMWare VSphere from 5.5 to 6 AND migrate from windows vcenter to the linux vcenter appliance
Hello we currently have vmware vsphere 5.5. We have 5-10 physical ESXi servers and one windows box serving as "vcenter" with another windows box acting as the SQL server back-end for vcenter. I heard recently that VMWare has released a linux-based appliance to act as vcenter. I would like to upgrade our environment from vsphere 5.5 to 6.x. I am excited to get rid of these two windows boxes and migrate to the linux-appliance. I heard there's an unsupported tool out there that will attempt to migrate your configurations from your windows vcenter server to the appliance. Has anyone had any luck with this? Or can we simply spin up the appliance in an entire new vcenter "domain" and put 1 or 2 physical ESXi servers in this new vcenter environment and then migrate our VMs from our old windows vcenter 5.5 environment to the new vcenter linux appliance 6.0 environment? Hope that makes sense, thanks.
ASKER
Thank you Andrew. I'm just a little foggy on how to transition, with as little/no downtime as possible, my live 5.5 environment and VMs to the 6.0 environment. So for example do I move all the VMs off two of my existing ESXi 5.5 serves and then un-license them from the 5.5 vcenter and then install esxi 6.x on those two physical servers and then install the VSA in that environment? And then how do I get my VMs from the standalone 5.5 environment (8 esxi hosts) to this new 2-host 6.0 environment? Hope that makes sense.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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1. You can spin up a new vCenter 6.0 appliance.
2. Remove/Dis-associate the existing ESXi hosts from current vCenter Server. (appliance)
3. Add ESXi hosts to new vCenter Server.
simple....and I've just written new EE Articles...
https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/17529/HOW-TO-Deploy-and-Install-the-VMWARE-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6-0-VCSA-6-0.html
have a read of this also
https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/18939/HOW-TO-Install-and-Configure-VMware-vSphere-vCenter-Server-5-5-for-Windows.html