We are moving from VSphere 4.1 to 5.5. We are very small with only 3 hosts running about 20 guest VM's on a SAN. Our old VCenter VM is still on Win 2003 and I am changing this as well.
So rather than doing an upgrade from 4.1 to 5.5 and converting the older vcenter 4.1, we decided to just complete a brand new installation of VSphere 5.5 to a new server we have. We also installed a brand new Vcenter 5.5 Appliance as well. So essentially we have two different installs of Vcenter, old and new running. Then we plan to manually move the existing esxi 4.1 hosts into the new Vcenter appliance. Then eventually move over the guests from an existing host to the new box and then wipe and reload each older host with 5.5
So I have already completed the first half of this project. But I have a question.
During the changeover from Windows VCenter 4.1 to the new esx host and VCenter appliance 5.5. I will be running both VCenter's (ver 4.1 and ver 5.5) simultaneously for a short period of a few days. One still running on the older 4.1 host and the new vcenter 5.5 running on the brand new esx 5.5 host.
We will walk one host at a time from the old VCenter and it will be added to the new Vcenter 5.5 appliance. But I will be sharing my only SAN of course. If I am doing this and running both versions of VCenter (old and new) at the same time and sharing my same SAN datastores at the same time, is there any problems with doing this? I didn't think so but I am not sure.
I installed the first new esxi host and I have pointed to my SAN datastores with no problems. And the datastores appeared as they should. But when I add this new host to the new VCenter, as part of the setup process it displays all the relevant San datastores. I thought this was odd to show during the VCenter “Add a host” step. Are there any restrictions to running two different VCenter VERSIONS at the same time on the same datastores ?
Thank you.
HMorris