Hello all,
Timid question as I make my first venture into paid VMware (been up for four years with the free version).
vmhost1: ESXi 5.1 free edition, production VMs, local storage
vmhost2: ESXi 5.0 free edition, production VMs, local storage
vmhost3: new machine, ESXi 5.5 licensed with the first of our Essentials Plus kit
vCenter: just downloaded and imported the appliance yesterday, have it managing the new vmhost3
downside: no shared storage. we're a small shop in a public university.
I do wish we had shared storage, but hardware-wise the 5.0 machine would make the smartest NFS server (more storage and less RAM than the others). My tentative plan is to convert the first two into licensed "Essentials Plus" hosts managed by vCenter, and use vMotion to non-disruptively move VMs across hosts so I can upgrade the older hosts. VMware's documentation says that 5.x licenses are interchangeable across minors, and that vCenter is backwards compatible to ESXi 4. Shared storage left for a future budget year, is this a reasonably safe upgrade path? Yes, I have backups.
Thank you!