Infrastructure Upgrade

Hi,

This is the order you need to follow;

1) Upgrade Vspehere to 6 (Including VCenter and all the hosts)
2) Upgrading all the Virtual machines from 2003 to 2012 then upgrade to 2016 (no direct upgrade from 2003 to 2016)
3) Same for Exchange as well (2007>>2013 then to 2016).

Hope this helps

Hi,
Thanks for the comment. We have purchased a brand new server as a new host for ESXi6 so it will be a new install for vsphere rather than an upgrade. Unless it would be easier to upgrade the current infrastructure to esxi6 and then migrate that config to the new host?

Thanks

Hi,

But your Vcenter is still 5.5 right? if so, you should either upgrade the existing VCenter to 6 then add the new host OR downgrade the new host to 5.5 then upgrade all host to 6. You can not add a Esxi6 host to an existing 5.5 directly as the Vcenter won't support this.

It is still on 5.0. I was thinking of somehow keeping the hosts separate and then just building the new servers on the new host and gradually migrate the data across the 2 hosts. Or will they both need to be within the same vcenter to be able to have the server VM's communicate properly?

Hi All,
Sorry for delayed response, been on annual leave.
So today i was asked about the networking side of things for the ESXi host. As this is the first time I am building a host and I have very limited knowledge of networking, i am not entirely sure on how this should be configured as best practice.

So we will be having 2 Meraki switches and 2 meraki firewalls, not stacked
The host has 1 NIC with 4 ethernet ports
We have 5 different VLANs, for workstations, Printing, guest wifi, corp wifi and servers
They currently have no VLANs at all

So i believe i need to patch 2 cables from the host into each switch, but regarding the config on the switch ports and the host is where it gets a bit tricky for me?

Thanks

Further assistance required