VMotion between disparate hardware

[thekhoury]

If I have a large cluster of older hardware (that uses CPUs that don't support EVC) and need to move virtual machines to a new cluster on new (incompatible) hardware (that does support EVC). Vmotioning between them is extremely time consuming and error prone.

Background information: The new and old clusters are all on Intel CPUs but with otherwise different hardware manufacturers. Shared storage between them both.

Two questions:

1. Is it normal for that process to be time consuming and error prone?

2. Spitballing here: Can I speed the process up by:

1. Creating a new cluster (let's call it staging) using some existing old hardware
2. Updating the processors to a compatible CPU that supports EVC
3. Vmotion to the staging cluster
4. Vmotion to the new hardware cluster

[weinstein5]

welcome to the community - My experience vmotion is rather error free - a couple of questionsdo the two clusters connect to the same shared storage? How is the vmotion netwrok configured - on the same subnet?

[tomtom901]

Is it an option to announce a maintenance window and do cold migration? You might save yourself a whole lot of time, and headache (seeing as you want to upgrade processors etc.).