To Upgrade vSphere 7u3 to 8 or Deploy VCF?

[evil242]

We are in the process of upgrading all our vSphere 7u3 domains to vSphere 8.  I know that I have to deploy a new management domain for VCF.  I assume I can migrate current management VMs (OPS, Automation, Logs, vCenters, etc.) to the new management environment from the old.  But my question:

Will upgrading testdev, management, and production vSphere domains first impede deploying the current version of VCF? 

[Marek Zdrojewski]

Hi,

The question here is whether you want to convert to VCF or stay on VVF?

• If you want to preserve your current vCenter, NSX etc. have a look at the VCF Import Tool. (btw, you'll need to do the upgrade to vSphere 8 BOM if you want to convert to VCF).
• If you planning to buy new hardware I suggest you go greenfield, deploy VCF and move your production VMs using HCX for example.

[evil242]

This is in response to Marek's answer.  We have 3 different vCenters for 3 different domains.  Management, TestDev, and Production.

My understanding was that we probably want to go greenfield for the management domain, creating a cluster that uses vSAN.  Currently we use NFS mounted data stores for everything including management domain.  We would just need to migrate in all management appliance VMS (OPS, Automation, Login Insight, vCenters) in.

We absolutely want to preserve our current production domain including vCenter and NSX. 

So are you saying once we get the VCF management domain up, we would use the VCF import Tool to import the production vCenter, or the management vCenter?