Greetings,
I manage backups using EMC Avamar 7.0, which we link to a Data Domain system for some backups. I am looking for an automated (or mostly automated) way to migrate hundreds of existing VMware virtual disk backups for VMs that are hosted by vCenter 5.1 to a new vCenter 5.5 complex. Our current vCenter 5.1 vSpheres are hosted under Windows 2008. Our new vCenter 5.5 complex is hosted by VMware appliances, which I believe are Linux-based. As a result, we cannot upgrade our vCenter 5.1 complex to 5.5; we have to migrate everything off the Windows servers to the vCenter 5.5 appliances. This poses a challenge in how to match that VMware migration within our Avamar data protection system.
We have upwards of 800 VMs that are involved, so doing this by hand via the Avamar Administration Console GUI would take hundreds of person hours and result in Avamar doing a new virtual disk backup for each VM, which would take several days for several of our most mission critical VMs and be prone to error. As a result, my colleagues and I need a way to automate the Avamar virtual disk backup migrations, or at least mostly automate it. This involves moving roughly 60 physical hosts across two vCenter 5.1s from being controlled by VMware 5.1 to being managed by 5.5. I am not a VMware administrator, so if I am leaving out any pertinent information, please let me know. I have also engaged EMC in coming up with a strategy to automate this process, but they have not come up with anything, at least not yet, so I am wondering if anyone in this forum has been confronted with this situation and if so, how did you deal with it?
Thanks,
Stan Horwitz