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MattJoyce
Contributor
Contributor

Single to Dual host migration

Hi all,

We have a single ESX Standard host with local disk space.

I'm planning to add a second host, attach shared iscsi storage and upgrade to ESX Enterprise.

Beacuse of budget constraints, I cannot afford a seperate physical server for Virtual Center, so I';m going make that a vm on the hosts it's managing.

My plan is to :

Build new sevrer

Install Enterprise ESX

Attach and configure iscsi space.

Move existing VMs to the new server.

Erase old host server

Install Enterprise on old host hardware

connect 2nd host to virtual center.

Questions:

q1 Is having virtual center as a VM a problem, I apprciate it may be less than ideal, but is it a Bad Thing ?

q2 How do I migrate the existing VMs?

We use ESX Ranger and I'm hoping I can backup from old, restore to new.

Or can I create a vmfs share on iscsi and copy vms in and use from there.

q3 How do I actuall add the second Enterprise host to virtual server to be used as a pool ?

Thanks

Matt

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5 Replies
GBromage
Expert
Expert

q1 Is having virtual center as a VM a problem, I

apprciate it may be less than ideal, but is it a Bad

Thing ?

I know that some people do it, but personally, I reckon it's a bad move. Definitely is if you're using DRS or HA.

You'll need to consider what will happen if you have a power failure, or if for any other reason that virtual machine powers off. You can use VI client to connect directly with the host, but with DRS you may not know which host it's on. Smiley Happy

You also need to consider what you'll do with the licensing server. Most people use their VC server and license server. But will the ESX host be able to contact the license server to get a licence to be able to turn on the license server?

q2 How do I migrate the existing VMs?

Put both the old and new server into the same VC server, power off the VM, right click it and choose migrate.

As for how you migrate the VM which has VC server running. Well, that takes you back to Question 1.

I hope this information helps you. If it does, please consider awarding points with the 'Helpful' or 'Correct' buttons. If it doesn't help you, please ask for clarification!
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FERC_ESX1
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

There's a Technical Resouce on running VC in a VM here (http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/798)

I don't think that there's a need to re-install ESX with Enterprise options. All the add-ons are installed with the initial installation. The license key enables the features.

Once you have your license server running properly with your new license file, you point the host to the license server and the features will work.

Message was edited by:

FERC_ESX

oreeh
Immortal
Immortal

q1: Running VC and the license server in a VM is no problem.

q2: You can use a temporary NAS (NFS) storage for this

(migrate the existing VMs to the NAS and move them to the destination storage)

or you can use VMware Converter

or you can connect your existing ESX host to the iSCSI storage and copy the VMs over (using vmkfstools)

q3: If you have the VC agent licensed simply add it to the cluster

MattJoyce
Contributor
Contributor

Firstly, thank you for your answers and contributions.

ESX1 has a Standard file licence.

ESX2 will initially have a Enterprise file license.

Once the Virtual Center VM is provisioned and the license server is functional, I'll migrate both licenses to the license server and upgrade ESX1 to enterprise.

Can VMs on the ESX1 DAS dataspace be managed by VC or will thay need to be moved to iscsi dataspace first ?

Thanks

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oreeh
Immortal
Immortal

As long as the VC agent is running on the ESX you can manage the VMs via VC.

The storage where the VMs reside only matters for vMotion (and HA/DRS).

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