We currently have 7 ESXi 5.0 hosts with approx 100 VM's
We want to move the vCentre over onto its self contained hardware and DB, as its currently a virtual one with its DB on a SQL server.
We also want to upgrade to 5.1 at the same time, looking at the documentation we can not upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1 with a hardware change at the same time.
However before the move to 5.1 it needs to be tested before put into production.
So just looking to find some advice on what people have done in the past, the best way to do this, that will not result in downtime or if downtime a tiny amount of it.
We were thinking of building a new 5.1 environment and just migrate the hosts from the 5.0 vCentre to the new 5.1 system, but looking into we will I belive lose our vSwitch configs, resource pools etc?
Would this path work:
Install 5.0 onto the new hardware along with a self contained SQL database, copy over the DB from the existing system, keep it on an isolated network and test to make sure it works, obviously it will not have access to the hosts would this be a problem? Also the network hardware will change.
Assuming that is possible, could we then upgrade to 5.1 and restore network connectivity to our live network, and it should all work?
Thanks
Kimbie