Migrate VM from one environment to another

[travesty]

I'm looking to migrate a virtual machine from one virtual environment to another. Both environments are ESX 3.5 but I think one environment is slightly behind on updates. What are the different ways to migrate this virutal machine between environments?

[DSTAVERT]

How is your environment structured. Both in the same cluster? Managed by the same vCenter Server? Same shared storage? What licenses do you have? ?????

[travesty]

These are completely separate environments, nothing is shared between them. We are running VI3 enterprise licenses.

[Troy_Clavell]

the easiest and most effective way would be to use VMware Converter.

[travesty]

Does VMware Converter need to be used in both environments or can I just get the virtual files from the old environment and then use Converter in the new environment to create the VM?

[Troy_Clavell]

I would use VMware Converter to pull from the source and place into the destination. This way if something goes wrong you have the original.

You can can have the sources as Powered on Machine (VM is powered on) or Virtual Infrastructure Machine (VM Powered Off). Your destination can be ESX or vCenter.

[travesty]

This solution doesn't work for me then. The two environments are completely separate. Different VCenters, different networks, different hardware, different locations, etc.

[Troy_Clavell]

Do you have network connectivity from your desktop/laptop to both environments? If so, just install Converter on your workspace and do the conversion.

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/converter401/dGhiZHRwaGJ0QGg=

[DSTAVERT]

And with converter, depending on the guest OS it can

track changes on the source,

quiesce,

shutdown source services,

apply changes to the destination,

shut down source,

startup destination.

[travesty]

Can I do it this way then? Convert the VM then do a VPN connection to the other environment and create the VM in the new environment.

[Troy_Clavell]

converter will create the VM for you. At a high level converter will create a clone of the original.

Wherever you are going to install and run converter you need to have network access to both environments.

[DSTAVERT]

You can convert it to an ofv appliance to a local disk then with the VPN you can import / deploy the ofv

[DSTAVERT]

The advantage to converting to ofv is that the disk is compressed. Move the compressed ofv files to the destination and use converter on the remote end or the VI client to import the ofv appliance.