Compatibility Issue Migrating VMs from vCenter 8 to vCenter 7

[Zach Nguyen]

Hi everyone,

We are currently migrating to a new data center running vCenter 8. Our existing environment operates on vCenter 7 U3p. We successfully completed a test hot migration from vCenter 7 to vCenter 8.

However, we are curious whether migrating VMs in the opposite direction-from vCenter 8 to vCenter 7-is supported in case of any unforeseen need.

While attempting an "Import VM" from vCenter 8 to vCenter 7 (initiated from the vCenter 7 instance), I encounter an issue at the step where an ESXi host must be selected as the migration target. The following error message appears:

"vCenter does not support hosts of this type ( )"

Could this be related to version compatibility? I haven't found much relevant information through my searches.

Thank you in advance for any insights!

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Zach Nguyen
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[rkabelich]

Hi Zach, 

vSphere 8 is using compatibility vmx-21 by default, which is not supportet in your vCenter 7 environment. 
So the compatibility has to be downgraded to vmx-19. Once downgrade was possible by editing vmx-file, but I think this doesn't work anymore. 
But there are some ways to do so: 
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/339998/downgrading-the-virtual-machine-hardware.html

For future VM creation process in your vCenter 8 environment take a closer look at step 5. There you can see "Compatible with: ". If you don't change the default setting to a lower version i.e. ESXi 7.0 U2 and later, the created VM cannot be run in vCenter 7. If you plan to run a VM in vCenter 7, you have to change this setting. 
Regards 
Ron