when you say dismantle your old environment do you just mean remove the cluster/hosts from the original vcenter server and add it to the new vcenter server? what exactly do i need to check to see if any cluster DRS/HA is setup?
at this point im really thinking that the way to go will be to build a new/fresh vcenter. my only question now is whether I should build a new server 2008 w/ SQL or whether I should use the vcenter appliance - which is starting to sound very appealing. any recommendations here?