Migrate VM to new farm

[aliff]

Hi guys,

Need proper advise for migration,

Scenario

i have 3 ESXi host, with one vCenter, and now plan to do some hardware refresh which replace the host with new host.

Existing

3x DELL R530 (plan for decommission)

ESXi 6.5

vCenter 6.5

New

3x DELL R740

The thing this company is 24/7, can't afford any downtime, the thing puzzle me is about EVC, i plan to setup new host and provision new vCenter, i will configure EVC to support existing host processor, i will use 1 existing host as a transport which mean, put some VM in that host, remove it from cluster and add to new cluster farm, then perform VM host migration, repeat the step for several time until complete migrate all VM, will this step still require downtime? as i bringing old host to new farm that already configure with EVC?

Thank You.

[dgreebe]

Hi,

Can you please tell me something more about your network-setup? and is there share storage involved ?

What you want to do, I did a couple of weeks ago also kinda.

We have extended our datacenter with a new cluster. Because those 2 clusters were using the same vmotion network I didn't had to migrate any hosts and just used vmotion to move VM's between those 2 clusters without any downtime.

It doesn't matter if one cluster has a different EVC-mode than the other, unless your VM is requiring those specific CPU-features. In that case you can migrate, but you have to poweroff and poweron the VM so the CPU features are applied

If this is also your situation, then I think i've answered your question. If i'm missing important parts, please tell me more about your network and storage-setup.

By the way, why do you want to provision a new vCenter ?

best regards

Dave

[MBreidenbach0]

I've used a similar procedure to migrate stuff from 5.5 to 6.0. Upgrading the old vCenter wasn't a real option for seperal reasons. Only problem were the distributed virtual switches. So I wrote some PowerCLI scripts that grab a NIC from the VDS, create a VSS, read portgroups from VDS, create portgroups on VSS and migrate VMs from VDS to VSS. Then takeover ESXi host from new vCenter, vMotion VMs (EVC configured) and use reverse procedure to move VMs from VSS to new VDS. I think I migrated about 150 VMs (and 20 VLANs) that way, Worked well.

[dgreebe]

May I ask what the problem was with the dVS ? their should be no problem to upgrade and use esx 6.0 with dvs version 5.5. The only "issue" is that you cannot use the NIOC v3 that is in dVS6

[MBreidenbach0]

There was a major restructuring of the environment and the old vCenter servers had their own problems so we decided to build new vCenter, add some new hosts, migrate VMs by moving their host to new vCenter, vMotion VMs, then reinstall not-so-old hosts and decommission the really old ones. Repeat until finished. While VMs stay running. So we had to move ESXi hosts with dVS configuration to a new vCenter with different dVS configuration. There may be different ways to do this. Manually remap the network config of >150 VMs and >20 portgroups isn't fun (and there will be some collateral damage) so I scripted that part. It worked so everybody was happy.