I've mostly been a hardware person up to this point so I'm pretty new to VMware (and a crash course in networking as well). Just created my VM account and this is my first question.
We are doing an application upgrade soon and my end is to create 5 new machines to replace the 5 old servers currently in production. I have the machines set-up and waiting on the vendor specific OS to power on the machines (Ubuntu if it matters), then assign them the same IP addresses as the original server. Once the vendor has finished setting up the new operating systems and respective applications the old ones will be turned off with no interruption of traffic.
What I am trying to understand how to do is assign the new machines the same IP addresses as the old ones and not have issues. I've read this can be done with network segregation, but I don't know how to accomplish this with vSphere, or how to frame the question properly to get the answer I'm looking for.
Thank you in advance for any instructions and guidance I receive.