How to move Horizon infrastructure to a new vCenter?

[NK_S7]

Hi all,

Unfortunatelly we have to replace our vCenter 6.5 by a new installation. This vCenter manages our vSAN and VDI with full and linked clones VMs.

Is it really possible without full VDI rebuild?

[vBritinUSA]

Hi, Check out this KB

https://kb.vmware.com/articleview?docid=2151610

This explains how to move the vSAN to the new vCenter.

When you disconnect the Hosts and move them to the new vCenter the Horizon Admin console is going to light up like a Christmas tree.

The linked clones, I would remove all the pools before you move to the new vCenter. The reason is there is a relationship with the old vcenter and yes you can do clean up after but it will be painful.

Remove the old vCenter from the Horizon Administrator console and add the new one in.

The Full Clones may need to be added back in as they are under a "New" vCenter or even possible you may need to remove the VM's from the pool and re-add them.

I'm sure I have missed things but I hope this is a helpful outline of the steps.

[BingyBam]

This is a pretty straightforward process if you are only using vCenter server to manage server virtual machines and can be done without any downtime to the VMs.

[NK_S7]

Thank you. This is realy helpful.

The main difficulty is that the downtime for some VMs can be just a few minutes.

So the plan can be :

1. build the new vCenter

2. reconfigure vSAN and other vSphere components

- during this stage Horizon and already existent VMs work but without provisioning (I hope so)

3. configure Horizon to work with new vCenter

4. create new automated linked clone pools

5. migrate users from old pools to the new ones

6. migrate full clones

[vBritinUSA]

Yeah, that the way I would tackle it.

I did this about a year ago for a large customer, the only difference was I didn't have vSAN.

Good luck!