Vcenter migration from appliance to windows

[itmanager2002]

Hi All,

been trying to read up on a way to migrate from the vcenter applicance to the windows version.

i installed the appliance and realized that i'm wasting more resources using it since i need another vm for the updates anyways. is there a way to move the configuration from the appliance to a windows install?

the appliance is version 5.5 u2

[itmanager2002]

update: i found this link just now. (google didnt return anything initially...weird)

going to try this now.

[rcporto]

Just to add, VMware don't support migration from vCenter Server Appliance to Windows version and vice-versa, take a look:

Migrating to the vCenter Server appliance

Ok so you may have survived the first few steps and ready to adopt the vCenter Server appliance but getting to it maybe more of a challenge. We do not have any migration/data tools available to move your vCenter Server on Windows to the vCenter Server appliance. You will have to deploy a fresh vCenter Server appliance and manually recreate the configuration and manually move the vSphere hosts over to the new vCenter Server appliance. Do you have any auditory requirements? historical data will be lost with the manual migration process and vCOPs will see the vCenter Server appliance as a new vCenter Server environment. This manual process could be eased with the use of PowerCLI but unique to each environment. Using an existing vCenter Server database is not an option.

Source: Which vCenter Server platform should I use - Appliance or Windows? | VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Bl...

[itmanager2002]

This is a lab so not to worry about best practice.

as of now  i've tried exporting the inventory from the appliance, this works. however when running the import on windows i get alot of failures. Undoubtedly due to the fact this tool was created for vcenter 4.1 and not 5.5. so naturally it errors out.

the most it is able to do is build up the folder structure. but not much else. the 4.1 servers have no problem being imported, the vds also imports for them. just not for 5.5

although asking a bit much would it be possible for someone to get in touch with the original inventory snapshot people to update their script?

this is the link to the tool https://labs.vmware.com/flings/inventorysnapshot