Made the move last week and all went well. We're using standard switches (Mauro, sorry, didn't see your response). We left the old Windows vcenter up throughout the process. My biggest issue was that there wasn't enough room in /tmp on my hosts to install HA when I moved them over. On most hosts, I was able to remove files from /tmp and restart the management agents to make the host recognize the free space. One host wouldn't recognize the free space until I restarted it. If you remove files from tmp and verify free space first, that will ease the process.
- Make sure you have all of your license info for hosts and vcenter. This can be copied from the old vcenter licensing in the client.
- Install and configure vc appliance with new name and IP using 60 day evaluation license
( One thing to watch out for, although it was probably just me being stupid - After the installation, there is a web based configuration gui on port 5480 that uses root to log in. This is separate from the vcenter web client interface that runs on port 9443. The 9443 one uses the administrator account, so pay better attention to which gui you need to be in for various set tasks than I did.)
- Created new datacenters and clusters on appliance
- Logged into old vcenter and disconnected hosts, then removed them one at a time
- Added hosts to the clusters in the new vcenter. You'll get messages that the license is still in use on the old vcenter. They won't prevent you from adding the hosts, so ignore for now.
- Configured DRS and HA on new vcenter
After everything looked good on the new vcenter, I manually removed all of the license info from the old vcenter and then removed all vcenter components. However, we still use that Windows server for a few utility tasks and it still has the sql express db, so I reinstalled Update Manager and pointed to the new vcenter. I used the existing instance of the db but let it wipe out history. After that, I added the update mgr extension in the client and created new baselines for my hosts. All good.
Johan, Are you using AD?
VMWare Environment: vSphere 7.0, EQ PS6210 SANs, Dell R730 Hosts, dedicated Dell switches w/ separate vlans for vmotion and iscsi.
