Moving View 5.1.1 Infrastructure to new Datacentre

[herrokitty]

Hi all,

I'm planning a move of our View Infrastructure from one datacentre to another, and am looking for some assistance.

At the moment we have a vCenter/ vComposer and 4x View Brokers in the old datacentre.

I have another project to move the vCenter/ vComposer to the new datacentre, but am looking at building 4 new brokers in the new datcentre, and then decommissioning the 4 old brokers.

Plan:

Build 4 new brokers in the new datacentre, build as replica brokers.

Make sure they can accept connections.

Now this is the bit i am stuck on....do i run the installer to decommission the old brokers one by one and then promote one of the new brokers to be the master?

Can these brokers still accept connections whilst the vCenter/ vComposer is in the old datacentre?

Also, in regards to DB backups, do i just backup the vCenter Server DB, View Composer DB, and the ADAM DB prior to promoting one of the new brokers to be the main broker?

Thanks in advance.

[shawnwatb]

replicating your view DB over the WAN is really band and will corrupt your DB (at least that is what i have heard from VMWare).

[mikebarnett]

OK, so there are a few considerations here.

If you are going to migrate everything at once you can certainly install replica Connection Servers in the new site to have the data replicated over. Once the new Connection Servers are up you can simply uninstall the old Connection Servers from the original site.

You can't run the old Connection Servers and the new ones in production as you will run into issues. You won't corrupt the database as long as the link is stable during the time you are doing the install/uninstall.

There is no such thing as a 'primary' Connection Servers. They are a cluster and all operate on the same level so there is no need to do anything special once you uninstall the old servers.

For backup, just backup the database of each component. View does an automatica backup each night at midnight by default so you can just grab the latest files. This includes an AD LDS (formerly ADAM) backup as well as a View Composer database backup. The vCenter database and Composer databases can also be backed up using the built-in SQL backup.

As for accepting connections, technically View could continue to accept connections but you may run into some connectivity quirks as View isn't designed to operate in this manner. If it is a very short window then you should be OK.

Let me know if you have more questions or if anything is unclear.

-Mike

[herrokitty]

Thanks for that Mike.

So basically i will install 4 new replicas, and then follow this kb to uninstall/ decomm the old View Connection Servers:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101015...

I will also backup the ADAM DB from a working replica and also the View Composer DB.

Not sure if it's necessary to also backup the vCenter DB but i guess i can do that too.

Since HTTP/S secure tunnel is not being used, technically i can do this during prod hours right?

[mikebarnett]

Sounds good. I would recommend backing up everything before starting just to be sure that you have the data in case something does go wrong.

Yes, if you are not using tunnelling then you will not affect currently connected sessions as you run through the migration.

-Mike