Moving ESXi to different vCenter

[jahalam414]

Some of ESXi need to move from old vCenter to new vCenter.

ESXi 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5 to new vCenter 6.5.

Looking to know if ESXi would be simply disconnect and remove from the inventory form Old vCenter? or Need to migrate vDS to vSwitch?

Please let me know.

[sjesse]

You first need to migrate them to standard switches, a vds is tied to vcenter, technically it may work since each host has a copy but its better to just move them to standard ones . Outside of that disconnecting and reconnecting to a new host works, but you lose anything that is stored in vcenter like alarms, permissions, and other similar settings.

[AhhhOK]

I'm going to trust that you have checked the compatibility between your oldest hosts and distributed switch with your new vCenter.  I can't recall them off hand.  If there are no issues there you can follow below:

You do not have to migrate to Standard Switches if the version of your current vDS is compatible with your new vCenter.  You can export the vDS from the old vCenter and import it into the new vCenter but only AFTER you migrate all your hosts.  Order of operations are as followed.

- Take RVTools Dump from old VC.  (ALWAYS TAKE AN RVTOOLS)
- Disable HA and DRS
- Disconnect Hosts from original virtual center
- Add Hosts to new virtual center
- Export Virtual Distributed Switch from old virtual center
- Import Virtual Distributed Switch into new virtual center

When you disconnect the hosts from the old VC the switch configuration is local and and the vm's will not lose pings.  Again, you don't want to import the vDS until AFTER all the hosts have been added to the new VC.  Please note, after imported it will take a pretty long time (hours if we are talking about 100's of VM's) for all the info in the Networking/VLAN/Ports column to update and show Link Up.  First time I did a lot of these I got cold feet but eventually everything caught up.

This old post still applies

https://www.ivobeerens.nl/2012/10/29/migrate-to-a-new-vcenter-server-with-the-vsphere-distributed-switch-vds-enabled-in-vsphere-5-1/