I am currently involved in an evaluation project for Hypervisor 5.5 and vCenter. Existing are 2 physical servers with redundant everything and 8 SAS hot swap hard drive bays. Initially, of the 8 bays only 4 were populated with hard drives. The hard drives were striped, ESXi 5.0 was loaded, 4 VMs were created on each server and all lived happily ever after.
Now I would like to upgrade those servers to 5.5... as follows:
I populated the remaining 4 bays on each server with hard drives and created a second stripe of sufficient capacity (twice the capacity of the original 4 drives). I shut down the servers, switched the boot stripe to the new stripe of drives and installed ESXi 5.5 on the new stripe. The old stripe also remains in tact, so I can boot to ESXi 5.0 if I set to boot from the original stripe or boot to ESXi 5.5 if I boot to the new stripe (both OSes boot fine, are properly networked, vCenter configured, etc.).
When booting into 5.5, it sees its own, new stripe and also finds the original stripe which is listed as a second attached datastore (I actually feel I want this to make the eventual VM migration easy from the old to the new datastore), both are Local LSI Disk, Non-SSD, Type VFMS5.
Panic sets in when I boot both machines into 5.5 and it comes time to add the 5.5 hosts into a cluster (I would also like to test DRS, vStorage, and HA) and I reach the setting of, "Choose Resource Pool." I am scared to death that selecting the first option, "Put all of this host's virtual machines in the cluster's root resource pool. Resource pools currently present on the host will be deleted." will mean not only a reformat of the new stripe which I would like to add to the cluster, but also the still attached older stripe which has data that I want to maintain. I do not want to lose the data or the VMs on the original stripe, but want to migrate them into a new cluster of 2 ESXi 5.5 hosts. I was actually hoping to migrate the data to the new strips on the new hosts and then re-purpose the 2 original arrays (across both machines) as a third vStorage array.
Questions:
1. If I select the option, "Put all of this host's virtual machines in the cluster's root resource pool. Resource pools currently present on the host will be deleted." with all drives attached, will all my data be lost?
2. If I pull the 4 original drives (5.0) and use the option, "Put all of this host's virtual machines in the cluster's root resource pool. Resource pools currently present on the host will be deleted." only with the new arrays connected (5.5), and then reconnect the old arrays after the hosts are added to the cluster, will the re added arrays still get sucked in and data deleted?
3. Is picking the second option, "Create a new resource pool for this host's virtual machines and resource pools. This preserves the host's current resource pool hierarchy." a safe option? If this option works, does it matter if I have my original array attached when adding the hosts into the cluster?
Last point: In reading every document I could find it seems strongly suggested to configure hosts that do not have an VMs deployed, which is why I am going to great lengths to try to keep the new hosts as empty as possible and with 1 port basic networking pending finishing the configuration. Does it matter if I migrate the VMs or add them as guests to the ESXi 5.5 before or after I add the hosts to the cluster?
Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated.