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We have an 8.5 MM and backup MM running as MM-VA-1K and need to move to new VM hardware and upgrade to MM-VA-5K. Current license count is 5k devices. Production network. Is there is a preferred order to upgrade?

Primary or backup upgrade first?

Will hardware change affect MM serial number or license passphrase?

Other considerations? 

You can do an in place upgrade of the VMM. It's not live, just don't have to rebuild from scratch. First, of course, take a snapshot of both your primary and secondary.

Then shut down the VMM. You will then need to go into your hypervisor and change the CPU and memory based on the new platform that you want. You can actually create a higher platform, but only install lower platform licenses if wanted.

Upgrading the disk is the tricky (not tough, just tricky) part. The disk cannot be resized. The VMM has 2 disks, a 4GB hard disk 1 (SCSI 0:0) and hard disk 2 (SCSI 0:1). You need to add a new disk, size appropriate to the platform you are upgrading to. This will be hard disk 3 (SCSI 0:2). At this point, simply boot the VMM. If the VMM sees disk 3, it automatically mounts it, formats it, and then copies the files from disk 2 to disk 3. You can see happening this as the VMM boots.

After it finishes booting, it has been changed and you can do "show storage" to see the storage and "show inventory" to see that your device is now the new device (eg. MM-VA-500 or whatever platform you are going to).

At this point you are technically done, but you should do the following steps for the future. Shut down the VMM and delete the hard disk 2, it's not needed or used anymore. Next reassign the SCSI reference for hard disk 3 (SCSI 0:2) to be (SCSI 0:1) since disk 3 is now disk 2. If you ever wanted to upgrade again, not changing this could cause a problem in the future during the upgrade process. In fact, before you do the upgrade process, to check that the initial 2 disks are SCSI 0:0 and SCSI 0:1.

Do this to each VMM, bring the primary up, then bring the secondary up, check that they are syncronizing the databases, and you should be good.

Did I mention to make sure you backed up the VMMs first.  :-)

I hope this helps,

Thanks for the quick reply. We previously upgraded from MM-VA-50 to MM-VA-100 so are aware of the disk resizing procedure. The last upgrade created problems when we switched from MM to backup and lost one of the controller clusters. Looking to avoid similar issues. We need to change the physical hardware. So the physical hardware has no ties to MM serial number or license passphrase?

I believe the license passphrase is tied to the VM, however these could be a hardware component linked to it. I think this could be easily determined by copying the VM to another hypervisor, and then doing "show license passphrase" and comparing it to the results from the VM on your current hypervisor.

Since you have already resized once, you will need to do the SCSI steps at the end first, changing the SCSI value so you have a SCSI 0:0 and 0:1, otherwise you will have issues (if you add a new 3rd disk and it is assigned SCSI 0:1 your system will boot off of that without copying the config from the other drive and it will treat it like a new install, nothing gets wiped out, it just boots from SCSI 0:1 which is blank).

I can't guarantee all of this in your environment, but this is what I've seen and tested while working on my book lab.

I hope this helps,