u/MrMHead

OK, I drank the Kool-Aid. I'll be moving to VCF9.x

But, I have a number of Nutanix clusters running ESX that are not ready to move to vCenter9.
I know I can roll from ESX to AHV, but that's not happening, and that's not the question.

Do I stand up another VVF8 vCenter and move the clusters there? - and subsequently upgrade the rest of the current VVF8 vCenter/clusters to VCF9.
And/or as an afterthought, can the new vCenter8 be managed by VCF9 for an extended period of time?

Or do I get my VCF9 overhead management domain and workload domains established and move the other clusters into VCF9? thereby leaving my current vCenter 8 and a few clusters behind.

Yes, I've seen and heard all the chatter about VVF licensing going away (or is it?)

I'm still struggling with the massive overhead VCF requires to go "Full Stack" with the management domain.

What if I wanted to keep my VVF footprint the same and move to "whatever whatever 9"

I have 2 vCenters in ELM, one at Primary site, and one at Recovery site. We use SRM for BC/DR with Array-based replication. And I have now stood up Aria Ops. We use vDS for data, and standard vSwitches for management. FC to back-end storage.

No NSX, no vSAN, no orchestrations, no cloud, no containers. Mostly Windows VMs

Can this configuration be upgraded to v9 as-is without the "Full Stack" overhead?

What happens to communications between vCenters for SRM without ELM?