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I currently have two ESXI hosts in a cluster with vSphere 5.0. My company has finally given me the green light on upgrading to 6.5 (don't ask why we're still on 5.0-weird corporate policy stuff). What would be the most non-disruptive way to do it?" I currently have 2 Dell R630 servers running vSphere 5.0 with shared storage presented by StarWind Free. Is there a way I can do the upgrade with 0 downtime?

BaronSamedi1958
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Johnyd
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1 Answers1

7

1) Backup everything with Veeam

2) Decomission one host from your ESXi 5.0 cluster

3) Create one-node ESXi 6.5 cluster from decommissioned in (2) host

4) Restore VMs from your backup to your new ESXi 6.5 cluster and make them running from DAS

5) Decomission ESXi 5.0 cluster completely

6) Bring in new ex-5.0 node to your new shiny 6.5 cluster

7) Install StarWind and create HA datastore

8) vMotion running VMs from DAS -> StarWind HA datastore

9) Enjoy life :)

The only place where you'll have minimum downtime is (4).

BaronSamedi1958
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