We have an S1 Email Management environment with two worker servers and one master cluster running 6.7.2. All running on physical servers.

The goal is virtualize it to our VM5 farm.

I thought about upgrading the existing servers first for 6.8 SP1 so we are running the latest version. Then I would build two new worker server VMs and add them to the S1 system and later removing the physical two workers.

What would be the best idea to get the master server turned into a VM? It is clustered now but there is no need to have that feature later on, a single VM is fine. A downtime of a couple of hours is also no problem. I would like to upgrade the OS from 2k3 to 2k8R2, so P2V is not an option here.

I upgraded the entire system a couple of times but never built a master server from scratch. (The SQL-server will remain unchanged)

Thanks!