Test migration

[jprovine7]

Can anyone tell me what all they had to setup to do a test migration from vcenter 5.5 to 6.5? What all is needed in the test network?

[daphnissov]

There's not really a "test" per-se, only a power on of your old vCenter 5.5 if you want to continue using it. That is unless you're upgrading from a Windows vCenter 5.5 in-place to Windows 6.5, in which case you had better snapshot and backup your vCenter and database prior to proceeding with the upgrade.

[jprovine7]

Oh i got the impression you had a test network and were able to test the upgrade to 6.5 in it. I have tried alot of things and no luck with testing the process

[daphnissov]

If you have something like Veeam you could test the upgrade by bringing up vCenter (and your database if external) in an isolated sandbox (SureBackup) and test the upgrade process there. Obviously, you'd have to be ok with it not being able to contact any of your ESXi hosts or VMs. I haven't done that myself, but it might work.

[jprovine7]

I have created a test vcenter server install and was able to import the database from our production server into it and able to bring it up, I just can't reboot it or install the update manager(this makes the migration assistant fail). Unfortunately I don't have DC's, ldap or DNS in my sandbox vlan and somethings in vmware appear to be  dependent on those resources. We do have veeam and I did attempt to restore the a full backup of our production vcenter server in the sandbox vlan but apparently we don't have one of the paid for elements to restore the backup to somewhere else so that failed.

I have learned alot from  my testing as it is, but this is a major move  I would feel better if I could see the whole process. From what I have see through testing and youtube is that this process goes pretty fast, you start up the migration assistant, start the appliance install.exe and then it basically spins up the appliance, copies all the setting to the appliance, shuts down the old vcenter server and brings up the appliance. Roll back is easy too, it it doesn't work you just turn off the appliance and turn the old vcenter server  back on.

[daphnissov]

If you're trying to test an upgrade to the appliance, yes, rollback is as simple as powering on the old vCenter. For your other scenario, vCenter is dependent upon core infrastructure like AD, DNS, etc and so those must also come up in the sandbox.