Migrate to new vCenter

[cconant]

I have two vCenters up and running, ESXi 5.0 and ESXi 5.5. Our existing environment is on 5.0 and 5.5 is a brand new environment I have built (we decided not to upgrade the existing environment for various reasons).  I'm trying to figure out the best way to migrate all of our VM's (over 100) from 5.0 to 5.5 quickly and with the least amount of downtime and was wondering what others have done in the past.  We have various workloads on these VM's (IIS, SQL, file servers etc.) and I'm open to any suggestions/ideas.

Thank you in advance!

[Fried Bacon]

Well you can always try v-motion but issues may occur since they have different ESXi versions and to add, you need a license
I would highly recommend to copy the whole folder of the VMs in your datastore

Once it is transferred in your ESXi 5.5 server then you can create a new VM, use the Custom installation
Setup as desired. at one point of the setup you will be asked to either create an new VM or select from an existing *.vmdk

You guessed it, select from an existing vmdk

You can even upgrade the RAM/CPU if you want too ^_^

Oh yeah, make sure the *.vmdk's are complete for it wont work if it is missing
Also, do not delete yet the VMs on your 5.1 just simply copy it to your new server, test it out first of course.

[bayupw]

Hi

As per VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes ESX/ESXi 5.0 is compatible with vCenter 5.5, so you can add the 5.0 hosts to vCenter 5.5.

Input the existing vSphere 5.0 licenses to the vCenter 5.5.

Is the shared storage accessible by both 5.0 host and new 5.5 hosts?

If yes, then you can vMotion from 5.0 host to new 5.5 hosts as long as they have same CPU Series, the procedures are described here: vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - Moving Virtual Machines Using vMotion During an Upgrade

Use this to check the CPU Series/Matrix: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=cpu

If they are belong to different CPU Series, you can only perform Cold Migration (requires downtime) vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - Virtual Machine Migration

Cold migration: Moves a powered-off virtual machine to a new host. Optionally, you can relocate configuration and disk files to new storage locations. Cold migration can be used to migrate virtual machines from one datacenter to another.

If you are using same shared storage, you can also do migration as below:

1. Power off the VMs in old 5.0 hosts

2. Remove the VMs from Inventory from vCenter 5.0 (take note the files location in the datastore) vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - Remove Virtual Machines from a Host

3. Add the VMs to inventory from vCenter 5.5 vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - Return a Virtual Machine or Template to a Host

4. Power on the VMs and check.

If the existing shared storage on 5.0 is not accessible from 5.5, you can perform LUN or Cold migration.

LUN migration requires less downtime compare to Cold migration.

LUN Migration:

1. Present the existing shared storage to the 5.5 hosts.

2. After the 5.5 can access the existing shared storage, shutdown the VMs

3. Remove the VMs from existing inventory from vCenter 5.0

4. Add the VMs to inventory from vCenter 5.5

5. Power on the VMs and check

6. Storage vMotion the VMs to new shared storage (you can also perform Storage vMotion first but you will need to present the new shared storage to the 5.0 hosts)

Cold Migration:

1. Present the existing shared storage to the 5.5 hosts.

2. After the 5.5 can access the existing shared storage, shutdown the VMs (for data consistency)

3. Clone the VMs from 5.0 hosts to the new 5.5 hosts (you can rename the old VM if you want so the new cloned VM will have the old VM's name)

4. Make sure the old VMs are powered off

5. Power on the new VMs on new 5.5 hosts and check

6. Remove the old VMs from inventory or delete it from disks

7. If you need to rename the VM's name, rename the VMs and perform Storage vMotion to different Datastore VMware KB: Renaming a virtual machine and its files in VMware ESXi and ESX

You can try to migrate 1 VM first or just create a new dummy VM and choose 1 ESXi 5.0 Host to test out the migration.

[cconant]

Thanks for the reply Bayu Wibowo.  I will be creating a small test datastore and VM and testing out your suggestions.

[ch1ta]

Additionally, you can do it with the use of Veeam free. It has migration functionality called Quick Migration, using which you can move VMs with minimum donwtime between hosts, datastores or both. You will need to add both vCenters to the backup console, select required VMs and start migration process. 

Cheers.

[cconant]

ch1ta, I actually have a full version of Veeam running in our environment and was not aware of this functionality.  I will definitely give this a try and see how it pans out, thanks!

[ch1ta]

In this case, you can replicate VMs to target host and perform permanent failover, once the process is finished. I believe this is what Veeam guys typically recommend.

Cheers.

[cconant]

Thank you everyone for your posts!  After thorough testing, I will be using the LUN Migration method for VM's that will be migrated to the new 5.5 hosts.  We will also be moving the remaining 5.0 hosts to be managed by vCenter 5.5.

Thanks!