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B-P
Contributor
Contributor

Machine migration without vmotion and on vmware essential licence

Hi everyone and thanks you for any help given in advance.

So we have a total of 3 physicals server inside the business. 1 new , 1 medium old if I could say and an old one.

We would like to migrate vmware machine from the medium to the new and the old to the medum.

The new is on vmware esxi 7.02 and the medium is on 6.5 for compatibility with the hardware.

We don't have vmotion in vmware essential, so I guess the only way I could do it would be to export these machine and reimport them? Correct?

I tryed to copy the folder of the vmware machine to the new one but i got a error saying that I can't enumerate all disk.

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-vSphere-Discussions/Unable-to-enumerate-all-disks/td-p/1366...

It seem that I am missing some file witch are deep into the system, so my other option is to export them localy (can't save directly to a NAS, or USB drive it seem). I am dealing with vmware machine around 1-2tb each.

Any tips or trick that I am missing?

Thanks!

 

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Unless I'm missing something, the Essentials edition should allow Cold Migrations, i.e. migrations for powered off VMs.

André

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B-P
Contributor
Contributor

Yes the only thing I can do is export the vm or export or export with images.

That's the only option I see.

 

Any other tips?

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IRIX201110141
Champion
Champion

You should read the above again.

The Essentials can migrate VMs when they are shutdown, so there is no reason for export/import or unregister.

Regards,
Joerg

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B-P
Contributor
Contributor

I do not have the migrate button.

My machine is shutdown and I do not have the option to do so with essential.

With essential plis kit it make sense, there is vmotion and there is probably the wizzard. But we are talking about essential here.

So again the only option is to copy the datastore to a NFS share or export the machine.

Thanks.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

What you explain sounds as if you do not have vCenter Server in place to manage the hosts!?
The Migration option is only available while logged in to vCenter Server, i.e. not if you are connected to a single ESXi host.

André

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IRIX201110141
Champion
Champion

If you are connected to the vSphere Client (formally know as WebClient) with your Browser and perform a right klick on a VM there should be a Migration Option in the context sensitive menu which starts a popup with 3(4 if youre on 7.0x) options.

If you dont the this youre connected to the ESXi HostClient with your Browser.

Regards,
Joerg

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IRIX201110141
Champion
Champion

If the migrate button is greyed out the reason is never a license issue rather than a technical one.  Has the VM something special or are other functions also greyed out? Test if other VMs have the same behavior.

Regards,
Joerg

 

 

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louyo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

You can do it with Veeam, do a backup and then restore using the option to restore to new location. Worked for me. Good to maintain backups anyway. 

Lou

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MichaelKauffman
Contributor
Contributor

Are they on shared storage, accessiblke to all hosts?
Then you would register the machine on the new host.

Or are they stored on local storage of the host, and you moved all files?
Then references from the machine files to the storage files will probably become invalid.

Perhaps you can create new VMs and attach the copied virtual disks to them?

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