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kilua07
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Migrate workloud from Vsphere 5.0 to 6.7

Hello community,

I have a situation where i need to migrate a workloud of +100 VMs from VSphere 5.0 to 6.7.

Note : when i say vsphere, i mean the whole workloud of ESXi and VCenter

well i can see that there is already the solution of Vmware Converter, but for +100 VMs it's not simple to do the same task again and again...

Another solution that i can't make it true, is presenting the datastore to the new VSphere, so that i can migrate the VMs directy from datastore to another. but this solution is impossible in my case, i can't (physically) connect the second datastore to the new vsphere

So i am looking for a solution to migrate those VMs to my new envirement, and do it as fast as possible, i looked for some command line tools and i already found "vCenter Converter SDK", but i don't know exactly how to work with it.

Finally, i have an idea of clonning the machines in a separete storage then migrate the clones to my new VSphere, but am not sure if this is possible while the VMs are running, and if possible can i take incremental clones, so that after a while i can only take the different between the clone and the VM.

Sorry for taking so long to explain my issue

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patanassov
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Hello,

If you can afford to power off the VMs, you could use SCP to move the files to the new datastore and then register the VMs in the new vCenter. (VMware Knowledge Base , http://www.vmwarearena.com/how-to-copy-files-between-esxi-hosts-using-scp-command/ ). Veeam's FastSCP may be an even better option.

The upside is that SCP should alleviate using NFC(*)  which can be a bottleneck in case of mass migrations. Both Converter and vMotion use NFC. Not sure about HCX (mentioned in another post), but its documentation reads "This service uses VMware vSphere Replication protocol to move virtual machines in parallel between HCX enabled sites". If, in addition to VR protocol, it uses also VR server, it uses NFC too at the final stage when it writes to the datastore.

Disclaimer: The above is more of a speculation, not empirically proven. I haven't actually done mass migration with scp. But you may want to consider it and do some experiments.

One more note: If you use Converter, you can do incremental cloning for Windows machines only, not for Linux.

HTH,

Plamen

(*) Network File Copy, VMware's internal protocol for writing to virtual disks.

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T180985
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You could disconnect the hosts from your old vCenter, connect them to the new vCenter and vMotion the VMs across to the new hosts and storage?

Please mark helpful or correct if my answer resolved your issue. How to post effectively on VMTN https://communities.vmware.com/people/daphnissov/blog/2018/12/05/how-to-ask-for-help-on-tech-forums
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scott28tt
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HCX does this: VMware Cloud


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patanassov
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Hello,

If you can afford to power off the VMs, you could use SCP to move the files to the new datastore and then register the VMs in the new vCenter. (VMware Knowledge Base , http://www.vmwarearena.com/how-to-copy-files-between-esxi-hosts-using-scp-command/ ). Veeam's FastSCP may be an even better option.

The upside is that SCP should alleviate using NFC(*)  which can be a bottleneck in case of mass migrations. Both Converter and vMotion use NFC. Not sure about HCX (mentioned in another post), but its documentation reads "This service uses VMware vSphere Replication protocol to move virtual machines in parallel between HCX enabled sites". If, in addition to VR protocol, it uses also VR server, it uses NFC too at the final stage when it writes to the datastore.

Disclaimer: The above is more of a speculation, not empirically proven. I haven't actually done mass migration with scp. But you may want to consider it and do some experiments.

One more note: If you use Converter, you can do incremental cloning for Windows machines only, not for Linux.

HTH,

Plamen

(*) Network File Copy, VMware's internal protocol for writing to virtual disks.

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berndweyand
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if you cant connect the old storage to the new hosts - can you connect the new storage to the old hosts ? which storage protocol do you use in both cases ?

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kilua07
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hello

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kilua07
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hello ,

I am presenting my storage from an SVC server ( IBM SAN Volume Controller ) and the ESXi are connected with HBA adapters to the SAN switch.

And yes this is a good solution that i will try tomorrow.

Thank you

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kilua07
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Thank you

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berndweyand
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if you can connect the new storage to old hosts (one LUN is enough) then you have an easy way:

- storage vmotion vm in old cluster to new storage

- shutdown vm

- unregister vm from old vcenter

- register to new vcenter

- startup vm (downtime < 5 min)

- proceed with next vm

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patanassov
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You are welcome.

I am glad to have been useful.

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