V2V ESXi 5.5 to 7.0

[ITguy86]

Hello,
I am currently running an ESXi Host 5.5 host on some older hardware. I have purchased a new server and have ESXi 7.0 installed on it. My question is, Can I use the V2V Converter to migrate the guests from the old 5.5 server to the new 7.0 without any issues?
I am planning to shut down each guest before the migration, I'm just trying to anticipate any possible issues before I do this as it is our production server.
I know VMWare no longer supports 5.5 or has the converter tool to do this, so I'm wondering if the StarWind V2V is my best chance at this. The guests are all different OS's from Windows to Linux.

Also, does it matter if theres snapshots? Will it bring the snapshots over as well or just consolidate as it migrates? I don't need the snapshots anyways.

Thank you!

[pbrutsche]

I wouldn't bother with any kind of V2V conversion, from any vendor.

Here's some ideas:
* If you don't have vCenter, the free community edition of Veeam Backup & Replication can migrate from one host to the other
* If you have vCenter on both sides, the simplest thing to do is to set up some sort of shared storage (such as NFS on a NAS) and just the NAS as a temporary storage location
* Last resort, export the VMs from the old environment into .OVA files, then import them into the new environment.

[yaroslav (staff)]

According to https://www.starwindsoftware.com/v2v-he ... tions.html 5.5 is supported.
The shared storage option is great. You could also use a trial or free version of StarWind VSAN for vSphere https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... r-vsphere/. You could deploy the solution on one node and it will act as hyperconverged, shared storage.
Please make sure to have vCenter compatible with ESXi 5.5. OVA transfer is a nice workaround.