Merging 2 different Vcenter Environments

[IndyESXi]

Good morning everyone.

My company currently has deployed VM Ware Vcenter Server, version 4.0.0. We are managing 5 different VM clusters (ESXi 4.0) within our environment, using an enterprise license. The company has purchased another company which also has a VM Ware Vcenter environment, albeit based on ESX 4.0. The powers that be would like to merge the two environments together and redeploy the Vcenter license from the new company (to a lab, dmz, etc...)

Maybe I have missed it, but I have not seen any utility that allows me to go out and merge these two different Vcenter environments into one management console. Can this be done? If so, what would be the steps? What are the caveats? The newly purchased company also has VM clusters in their environment, and I am a little concerned that just trying to move licenses from one Vcenter console to the other will break the associations within the cluster.

If anyone has some experience with this that they would like to share, it would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[idle-jam]

you could perform a vcenter consolidation to a single vcenter managed. another approach would be to implement vCenter Linked Mode. Both will merge to have a single view without any changes (except to make sure the vcenter are of the same version).

here is a tutorial. http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1380856,00.html

iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

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[IndyESXi]

Idle-Jam

I am interested in the vCenter consolidation that you mentioned. The vCenter Linked Mode is definately an option, but I don't think that it is going to allow me to recover the license for the second vCenter server. If you have some further information on the consolidation, I would be very interested in that. The linked mode does give us the single management console though, so thanks for that input.

Thanks again.

[AndreTheGiant]

You can simple create a second VMware cluster in one vCenter and add the other hosts to it.

They will be automatically removed from their vCenter center.

Andre