Best Way To Migrate A VM

[Fergieman201110]

Hi Guys

We have around 10 of our own vms currently running on Vsphere 4.1. Due to company growth , my company is planning on getting its own Vmware Vsphere system. Version 5. I will need to migrate machines currently running on the other companies vmware to ours. (just to cut out any questions we piggy back IT hardware from a sister company). The vcenter servers will not be linked - but I will need to move all machines and storage. We currently run Exchange and file servers on the current infrastructure. What is the best way for me to move the machines would people think  ?

Cheers....

[Shakaal]

Hi,

If somehow you can get storage level replication done that would be the easy way. Else in case of different VC's there are 2 options available:

1. Storage is Shared between new environment and old one.

     a. Storage vmotion the Vm's from old storage to new Storage after creating VMFS Datastores on New Storage.

     b. Once migrated poweroff the VM's and register them on to new Hosts, from New Storage.

2. No Shared Storage and no connectivity between old and new environment at storage level

     a. In this case you have to download the VM's from old environment to a machine which can see both the environments at network level

     b. Once downloaded you upload the VM's to new Storage

     c. After uplaoding the VM's register the VM's to new hosts using VI client.

you can also try downloading the VM's to a USB drive, ship the USB drive to new Datacenter get it atatched to new vCenter Server, upload the files. Register the VM's to new host.

Regards

[Troy_Clavell]

remember, you cannot Storage vMotion, clone or vMotion guests across vCenter instances.  So, to use the vMotion strategy you'll need to have a single vCenter instance.

Otherwise, to move your guests, you may have to use Converter.

[aravinds3107]

You may have to use VMware Converter to migrate VM's and clean up the old hardware hidden devices, Update Virtual hardware version 8 and VMware tools version to get the better performace when you are running the VM's on ESXi 5.0.

[Fergieman201110]

Ok , the machines will be on the same network - so I have to use converter to pull the machines and all their date in the new vmware vsphere 5 setup ? Could I export the machines as an ovf templates ?

[aravinds3107]

yes you export as OVF but what is the purpose of exporting to OVF, Instead of that you can move the VM's to USB device and re-attach to the new enviroment as suggested by Shakaal

[Fergieman201110]

Thanks fellas. Sound a lot simpler to what I had imagined .