Adding an esxi 4 host to vCenter

[FischerSobell]

For a few years now we have been running a single host on esxi 4 and currently all our production VM's are on this host. We've recently deployed two new servers on which we've installed an evaulation copy of esxi 5. We've also deployed a ISCSI SAN data storage solution onto our network. We've got vCenter working fine and have built a couple of test VM's on the new servers.

We plan to go with the Essentials Plus kit as it supports vMotion and HA, both of which we feel we would benefit from. My question is simply this. If we purchase an Essentials Plus licence, will that enable us to licence the old esx 4 server, such that we can add it to our datacentre? If we could do this we would then like to use vMotion to migrate the production VM's to the newer hardware platform. The end game would be to migrate the production VM's then upgrade the old host to esxi 5. The production VM's are stored on the old hosts physical drive and obviously we would like to migrate them to use the SAN storage at the same time if that were possible.

Cheers,

Ian

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

basically you can downgrade your licenses in the My VMware portal to be able to add a 4.x host to your vCenter Server instance. However, whether your plan will work depends on which ESXi 4.x version you are running (vMotion was added to Essentials Plus with version 4.1) and which version of vCenter Server 5.x you have installed. Please take a look at http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide2/sim/interop_matrix.php to find out whether your ESXi version is supported with your vCenter Server version.

Anyway, if your hardware is supported, you may consider to upgrade the ESXi 4.x host to version 5.x first and then add it to the vCenter Server cluster.

André

[FischerSobell]

Thanks André,

Since the old host is running 4.0, it will probably make sense to upgrade it to 5.1.

Ian