Best Practice Help For Moving To New vCenter With Linked Clones

[DJLO]

Hello everyone

I have been searching for days but cannot find a clear cut way to move our View 5.2 install over to a new vCenter.  The hardware was aging and we decided to upgrade and move to 5.5.

We have rebuilt and moved over all our non VDI hosts to the new vCenter 5.5 environment. I have found a few documents but nothing that tells us if this can in fact be done.

We attempted to move the composer service initially to the new vCenter instance and keeping it pointed to the DB on the old VC,  If this worked i would migrate the DB over to the new VC

We first tried these steps VMware Documentation Library however after removing the composer service from VC Old and installed it on VC New (with ODBC connections mapped to old VC) it would not work.  We ended up moving everything back to the 5.1 VC leaving the ESXi hosts running VDI attached to 5.1

Then i did more digging and discovered the linked clones are all tied to the database from the old VC and moving them is not possible per this KB VMware KB: Moving View-managed desktops between vCenter Servers is not supported

I saw an article here that suggested dumping a bunch of DB and rebuilding the new VC with the same name and IP address but i cannot do this since the new instance is already up and on a new host name / IP Migrate View VCenter (with Linked Clones) to new hardware

I also found this where someone is in the same boat and was suggested to re-create the pools.  The discussion didn't go into any details so i'm wondering if someone can elaborate on this : Migrating View Composer and vCenter

I have about 20 people on VDI in a combination of 3 pools all using linked clones and personal drives.  Since all the linked clone info was tied to the old VC database, it doesn't seem to make sense to move it over.  Would this be possible:  I still have the base image with all the snapshots for each pool.

• Backup persistent drives
• Note every pool’s configuration
• Disable Provisioning
• Create empty composer DB on VC 55
• Create ODBC connection for composer on VC 55
• **
• Bring ESXi hosts over to VC 55
• Remove existing VMs (won’t be able to log into them at this point anyhow)
• Remove old VC entry from view admin / remove existing pools
• Install Composer on 55 and point to new ODBC
• Create new vCenter instance in View Admin pointing to 55
• Re-create pools
• Import and attach persistent disks (http://pubs.vmware.com/view-50/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.view.administration.doc/GUID-BDFCCEC8-682...)
• Recreate empty events DB on 55
• Reconfigure events DB setting in View Admin

Any help would be greatly appreciated as i cannot find an exact way to do this

[DJLO · Accepted solution]

Well I'm glad to report this worked! I had a few problems deleting the existing pools. View kept saying deleting but nothing happened. In the end I had to use ADSIedit on the connection server to manually delete all the old VM and pool records

After installing composer on the 5.5 VC, I was able to create a connection in View admin and then begin re-creating the pools.

We were able to successfully reattach each persistent disk to their intended owners.  Did some spot checks and the users desktops , bookmarks etc all worked

It was a time consuming process but it does work. Hopefully VMware can create an article for this.  Lord knows I searched for days, i had to read a lot of things just to formulate this plan.