So much joy coming my way.
I have vcenter 5.5 running on a Win2k8 R2 VM with SQL 2005 Express. We have 6 vSphere 5.5 hosts - one cluster with 4 production hosts and another cluster with 2 test hosts. The Windows server is not in AD yet because vCenter fails after I join it, so I keep reverting back to a pre-join snapshot.
Since I'd really like to get it joined to AD and I'm starting to struggle with performance issues, I thought it might be a good time to make a change. Shrinking the DB ought to help a bit, but I think an upgrade is inevitable. I'm considering this plan:
- Back up the VIM_UMDB and VIM_VCDB databases and save to offline storage
- Uninstall vCenter and SQL
- Join to AD
- Install latest vCenter and full SQL 2008 or 2012
- Restore databases
- Drink
Optional bonus - down the vcenter vm and install the vcenter appliance.
Questions -
- Can the backed up SQL databases be restored to the vcenter appliance
- Is it better just to recreate the clusters from scratch? If so, how much of the configuration will I have to redo (networking, security profiles, etc)
- If recreating, should I disconnect the hosts from the current vcenter after I get the DB backups? Any other steps to disassociate from the current vcenter?
I'm starting to look at documentation, but I'm hoping for some real world advice.
Thanks.