I'm planning the upgrade of an existing VMware Infrastructure 3 (Virtual Center 2.5 + ESX 3.5) to vSphere 4.1, and I'm stuck at upgrading the Virtual Center server and its back-end database.
vSphere 4.1 is only released as a 64-bit software, so it needs a x64 O.S.; this rules out an in-place upgrade of the existing server.
The plan is to install a new Windows Server 2008 R2 server, with SQL Server 2008 (or 2008 R2 if supported), migrate the database and install vCenter 4.1 on the server.
The question: how do I migrate the database?
When performing an in-place upgrade of Virtual Center to vCenter 4.0, the database is automatically upgraded; but this is not the case when installing a new server.
VMware provides an utility to dump the existing database and import it into a new server, but it only works for SQL Server Express (which according to VMware itself should not be used in medium/large production environments); so this is not an option.
I'm unable to find a supported procedure to perform this migration.
Can anybody please help?