Our existing VM environment consists of an HP Bladesystem c7000 with 12 blades. Each Blade is running ESX5.0 and we have a physical server running vCenter 5.0 managing the 12 hosts and their VM's.
The datastores are via a 10Gb connection to remote disks.
We are planning to replace the existing Disk system and do some major fabric and firmware upgrades to the HP Bladesystem c7000. Whilst we are doing this we would like to upgrade to ESX5.1
We have got two temporary HP servers running ESX 5.1 and a VM running on one of these temp hosts with vCenter 5.1 installed. The temporary ESXi hosts have a connection to the existing datastores and also the same physical network.
Now I need to move the VM's from the 5.0 environment to the new temp 5.1 hosts whilst we do the maintenance work on the Blade enclosure.
I have successfully removed a VM from the 5.0 inventory and added it to the 5.1 environment, but this method of course involves a shut down and and restart. Some of the machines are critical servers that require minimal downtime.
Can the VM Update manager assist in migrating from one to the other or do I need to perform an upgrade of the existing 5.0 to 5.1 first?