Migrating and Upgrading physical systems is night mare, However with VMWare vSphere its not that complicated, a proper planning will always leads to successful migration from vSphere 5.x to 6.x without any downtime for the VM’s. Some cases might need downtime for VM’s which is described in this post. I would recommend to go through the complete post as this is the same process or approach for all the vSphere migrations irrespective of the versions.
For the successful migration we need to know the existing environment completely. Gathering the existing vSphere environment details is very important. Thanks to RVTools which will do this in just couple of minutes. After getting the information from RVTools we need to analyze the info and gather below information.
- Existing vCenter Version and Build no
- Existing ESXi Hosts Version and Build no
- Existing Server hardware model, Make along with NIC and HBA cards info.( this is important if same hardware is used for upgrade)
- Standard switch or Distributed switch in use with its port groups, uplinks and vLan details
- Cluster information with HA, DRS rules
- EVC Mode information and server maximum supported EVC mode.
