Our organization is looking to migrate our existing Failover Cluster from 2 physical servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 to 2 VMware guests running Windows Server 2012 R2. Hoping someone can point out a logical migration path.
In our current setup, we have 2 physical nodes (FS01 and FS02) both running Windows Server 2008 R2. For storage, we have 18 RDMs presented to both nodes from an HP 3PAR back end. All 18 disk drives are currently running from FS1. Within Failover Cluster Manager, we have a common Server Name (F01) and all shares are mapped using it.
My question is where is the logical place to start looking at migrating to 2 virtual nodes running Server 2012 R2? Will we be able to preserve the common Server Name (F01) that all of our shares currently point to? Is it best to spin up an entirely new file services cluster with the VMware guests and migrate our drives over one at a time, or can we add the new VMware guests to our existing failover cluster and move the drives to them one at a time? From everything I've read, OS mismatches are not permitted within a failover cluster.
Thanks