VM migration from ESXi 6.7u3 old H/W Cluster to New H/W cluster with ESXI 7.0u3 - v2v

[SathisRatnayake]

Hi All,

Would like to know your success stories regarding the following.

We are planning to migrate 50 odd VMs from ESXi 6.7u3 old H/W Cluster to New H/W cluster with ESXI 7.0u3 using vcenter standalone converter V2V.

However, our old H/W Cluster is separated with the New H/W cluster as it located in different datacenter from the old one.

We are planning to connect the 2 site with 1 Gbps dark fiber link to connect the each site during v2v migration period. Highly appricate your experiences and feedback on this. Like to know how long to normaly takes to migrate a one VM with 100 GB  vmdk disk. 

[Andre Nordhuus]

We did this 5 years ago, but we used a shared NFS storage instead between the old and new vcenter.

This is how we did this.

1. Migrate to shared NFS store.
2. Unregister virtual machine from the old vcenter
3. Register the VM'on on the new vcenter.
4. Migrate the vm form the shared nfs datastore to your another datastore.

We moved about 550 VM machines like this.

[Jorge Bastida]

I think the tool you need for this move is vSphere Replication, so you can do the replication simultaneously. and does not need additional licenses.

[pcgeek2009]

I have used converter in a similar scenario, but I was migrating from a Nutanix AHV cluster at one location to a vSphere cluster at another location. Therefore, converter was necessary. However, this is a fairly slow process with some VM's taking up to 6 or 8 hours to move. I typically did it over a weekend. As previously mentioned something like vCenter Replication would be a better option. You really do not have a need to run converter.