Hi all,
I have a client that wishes to upgrade their vSphere platform from 5.5 to 6.5 via a side-by-side migration. To ensure as little production downtime as possible, ESXi 5.5 hosts will be disconnected from vCenter 5.5 and re-connected to the new vCenter 6.5 environment. To accomplish this, all SAN LUNs, networks etc will be shared across all ESXi 5.5 and 6.5 hosts.
Part of this project will require the migration and upgrade of SRM to 6.5, however as the new vCenter 6.5 will be a new instance and not an upgrade I am not sure how the SRM migration should proceed.
The current SRM configuration is a fairly simple Prod/DR arrangement:
- Protected Site (Production)
- Recovery Site (DR)
- EMC FC storage
- Array replication and EMC SRDF's used.
The client wants to create a new SRM 6.5 instance in the new vCenter environment but I have concerns around having any kind of storage coexistence between the production SRM and new 6.5 SRM instances. Is there any way to safely share LUNs/Datastores in a way that facilitates an easy SRM transition or will I be forced to uninstall/disable the original SRM environment before the new SRM 6.5 can be configured?
Cheers