Moving to a new vCenter Server

[littlebox]

I need to change vCenter servers for 3 hosts. We are running 5.1

The current vCenter is a VM running Win2k8 Enterprise and I need to move it to another VM running Win2k8 Standard.

I created the new VM, successfully installed SQL 2008 and vCenter 5.1.

I found a related discussion here:  http://communities.vmware.com/thread/295895

The suggested steps in that discussion are:

- Disable HA's host monitoring

- Disconnect host from old vCenter

- Remove host from old vCenter

- Add host to new vCenter Server

- You will be prompted wether you want to add all of the host's Resource  Pools under a Grafted from ... resource pool or put all your VMs in the  cluster's root pool. Select the grafted from... so you can keep your resource  pools. The you can move pools around in the hierarchy on the new vCenter.

- After you've moved all your hosts, you can enable HA host monitoring again,  and check that DRS has the settings you

The discussion applied to esx 4.1. Does this approach still apply to  5.1?

Thinking out loud here but would it be possible to just:

1. Backup the database on the old server and power it off.

2. Restore it on the new server and change the IP address to the old server

Our environment is currently a test environment so I am not too concerned with downtime.

Appreciate any comments/suggestions.

[Ather_Beg]

Hi

I have not tried it with 5.1 yet so can't say for sure but the steps mentioned by you are definitely good for any other version so trying it won't harm given it's a test environment.  Backup and restore of SQL is a possible option but is way too complicated for the task you mention.  It would have been a good option if you had lots of hosts, configuration and logs in the database but for a test environment, it seems like an overkill.

Hope this helps!

Ather

Message was edited by: Ather Beg