Solarwinds upgrade planned on VM , existing Solarwinds application server is physical server.

The physical to virtual part should not be an issue.  If you want to keep your historical data you will need to step through several versions to get from where you are to where you need to be.  If you download the installer for the latest version it will let you know the upgrade path you need to do, off the top of my head I think there are 3 steps to get your NPM to the current one, plus the steps for the other modules.  I'd definitely set yourself up for a long maintenance window, might take most of a day of watching the configuration wizards crawl along.  Definitely make backups of the db and test it along the way too because it is very frustrating to get to the end of hours of upgrades to find out something went wrong in the db all the way back at step 2.

I actually did a quite similar upgrade back in January on our system. I recommend installing 11.5.2, 7.4 & 4.1.1 on your new server and migrating and then upgrading from there. The new installers will or should actually help you install everything you need to get it up to the newest version and I don't believe you will have to do it manually either. We did have a lot of problems with licensing when I moved everything and it was quite a pain I spent the better part of two days on the phone with support trying to get everything worked out. Once everything was up and running we have had no problems since.

Good luck and feel free to ask questions!

I did the same thing recently except I first moved the Solarwinds from physical to virtual. Made sure everything was ok. I then upgraded the products to the latest version.

I moved from NPM 11.0.1 to 12.1. I also have NTA, NCM, IPAM, UDT and VQNM. So there were lots of upgrades to step through.

We are doing similar. But we may P2V the server. Anyone done this and did they experience any issues?