Upgrading vCenter 5.0 Windows/MSSQL to vCenter Server Appliance 5.5

Hello,

We are currently running vCenter 5.0.0 under Windows/MSSQL (with a mix of ESX 4 and ESXi 5.0 hypervisors). We would like to upgrade to vCenter 5.5 but using the appliance instead.

Is there a proper way of doing this upgrade ? Can we just deploy the new vCenter using the appliance and then disconnect the hosts from the old, and reconnect them to the new ? Will that work "out of the box" ? Any shortcomings ?

Do we need to export any settings from the old vCenter ? (we are not using distributed switches and we do not care of the historical data/logs/performance etc.).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Alex