Gateway Cluster Hardware Upgrade

[Luis_Miguel_Mig]

I am upgrading the hardware of a cluster made of two open server gateways. The manager has a license of 10 gateways and it manages 10 gateways.

Is it possible to have a cluster made up of two gateways with different hardware?

So what process would you recommend for the migration?
I was thinking three options:

1) shutdown one of the old gateways and connect one of the new gateways with the configuration of the old gateway, establish SIC, push policies and failover. Finally repeat the process for the second old gateway.

Is this possible as we will have a cluster made up of gateways with different hardware?

2) Add the 2 new gateways with new ip address (the cluster will be made up of 4 gateways at this stage) , failover to them and shutdown the old gateways.

Is it possible, as we will have 12 gateways and we have a license only for 10 gateways.

3) shutdown the old gateways. Connect the new gateways, establish the SIC, push the policies. 
This is the less preferred procedure as it will require outage.

[AlekseiShelepov]

As I understand, you will migrate to a new open server (not Check Point appliance). In this case you need to make sure that you have the same amount of enabled cores (SND, fw_worker) on both servers, preferably the same software version with the same hotfixes. A cluster like this should work fine, based on my experience.

Personally I would choose the first plan. Install policy, check the cluster status, check sessions, etc. If everything is fine, then failover. If synchronization was not ok and sessions are lost, it still would be faster than plan no 3 

But as Vladimir mentioned, evaluation licenses can help for the second plan.

[Luis_Miguel_Mig]

Thanks Aleksei, good to know that you have tested a similar process/environment succesfully