Migrating templates and VM's Across WAN to seperate Vcenter

[GFFG]

Hi!

I have two fully independant Vmware clusters residing in two different branch offices. I'd like to copy and clone some templates that I have in one cluster and copy over the wire (E10) to the other location. I've never re-registered Vm's. How do you suggest I do.

Add each other's datastores so that all esx's in the organization see each other's datastores?

This would facilitate v-motion and s-motion I assume? How would you guys handle this?

[Rockapot]

Depends on the WAN link..?, usually with new conversions I would zip them, send them to the remote site and do a checksum on them to validate they are not corrupted.

In the scenario where they are on a VMFS partition already you could either get the SAN admin to use some storage tools to copy the LUN's accross (unless of course there are some VM's on the LUN you dont want copied)

Alternatively just unregister, copy, reregister by browsing the remote sites datastore and selecting the vmx file and registering it.., its a straight forward process.

FastSCP is also a great tool for browsing datastores and doing copy tasks etc..

Carl

[Troy_Clavell]

I think the easiest way would be to convert the template to a VM, leaving it powered off, then use VMware Converter to copy it over to the other vCenter instance. Once there, convert the VM back to a template.

[GFFG]

So would I run vmware converter over on the destination V-center pc and then some how point all the way across the wire to this VM? I'm not sure how I would browse across the wire?

Unless my esx's over there were connected to NFS lun's residing in other office I don't know how to? Hmmm the converter might work if the vm was powered on and I ran converter from that pointed all the way across the wire.

It would be nice to setup v-motion and s-motion though to move vm's! That is the beauty of portability!

[Rockapot]

You mentioned you want to copy the VM's. In this case Vmotion and SVmotion will not work as these technologoies are for migrating VM's and moving data files respectively.

Carl

[GFFG]

Your right I did ask about copying, my question regarding smotion is a vmotion is a bit different but the co-workers are asking for that to occur! Just move these 4 servers over there please and don't shut them down!

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

It should work with converter, I do it all the time when copying templates from on vCenter instance to the other. I use the stand alone version. Granted it's not across the wire, but if your WAN link has the available bandwidth it will work

for sVmotion your ESX host has to be able to see the source datastore because during the process the VM will reside on both LUNs for a period of time.

[Rockapot]

I agree., if there is available bandwidth it will technically work.

Do the migrations out of business hours when network bandwidth may be more available etc..

Out of interest what is the size of the VM's which you are wanting to move, and the WAN link?

Carl

[GFFG]

Ok well then I will have to add each other's datastores to each VCenter. They are on Net-app's and this means I'll have to adjust the "manage exports" feature to include the new subnet's so the esx server's have rw and root access to the all the NFS volume's in question. Interesting.

Most Vm's are thick VM's at 15GB or 20 GB. One is 8GB ...

We have a E10 connection between offices. 2 GB windows transfer of an ISO took less than hour I believe however I wasn't timing it exactly.

[Rockapot]

The link should be fine then and the VM's are fairly small.

Carl