migrating VMs from Legacy ESXis to UEFI ESXi hosts

a1a23 — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 14:26:15 GMT

Hello Experts.

we are in a stage to migrate our VMs running on older hardware with bit older CPUs (E5-2680 v3) to newer hardware with Xeon 6338N/similar/greater series CPUs.

from what we see, the newer platforms go with UEFI boot by default.

our plan is to

get the new hosts installed with ESXi

VMotion the VMs which are living in older hardware to new hardware (shared storage)

we are not planning to make any changes in VM's BIOS.

is there any known issues in migrating the VMs this way? is there any best practices documented in this topic?

Thanks in advance.

Re: migrating VMs from Legacy ESXis to UEFI ESXi hosts

battybishop — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 17:47:30 GMT

We've done similar things in the past without any issues, If your clusters are normal (not evc) then you may have issue's doing live migrations back to the old CPU's if the VM has restarted as it will pick up the characteristics of the new CPU. If this happens you'll need to do a cold migration. Apart from that you shouldn't have any issues, as always do a test machine first

topic migrating VMs from Legacy ESXis to UEFI ESXi hosts in VMware vSphere™ Discussions

migrating VMs from Legacy ESXis to UEFI ESXi hosts

Re: migrating VMs from Legacy ESXis to UEFI ESXi hosts