We have servers (ESXi host machines) that have reached end of life and also an older storage system that was connected to those hosts that we are transitioning from and will eventually power off and remove from this vSphere instance. We now have added replacements for the hosts which are using Intel CPUs in place of AMDs, the new storage is also set up with those hosts, networking has been linked for the new hosts to the same distributed switch used on the old cluster, and we've tested migrating the VMs with the following configuration as described:
vCenter: VCSA 6.7 (currently operating in the old host 6.5 cluster)
Cluster 1 (old):
5x AMD ESXi 6.5 hosts
Fiber attached SAN A
distributed switch uplink set A (vDS-1)
Cluster 2 (new):
5x Intel ESXi 6.7 hosts
Fiber attached SAN B
distributed switch uplink set B (vDS-1)
We've been warned that, since the new ESXi hosts are Intel (not AMD, like the old hosts), we would need to power off the VMs before moving them to the new Intel 6.7 cluster, so a live migration/vMotion to the new cluster would not work. We did that and had success with a few test VMs (both storage and compute resources). We will repeat with the remaining VMs. However, we have one VCSA managing this entire environment among those VMs, and vCenter is what manages the vMotion, correct? So, if we must shut that appliance VM down, like the other VMs to move it to the new cluster, what is the best procedure to do this safely without negative impacts?