Migration of vm to new box

[ChrisLopes]

I have a customer who have 3 esx 2.5 server sitting on a EMC SAN.

Customer purchase 3 blade server that need to be connected to the EMC SAN to

Assuming the 3 blade server have e3.5 esx setup and the new SAN Lun have been rescan, what is the procedure & tools to migrate the existing vm in 2.5 into esx 3.5 vm. How will the new VC registered the old VM that has been copy.

Tks

[williamarrata]

The trick is to make sure that both the 2.5 and 3.5 servers are hopefully on the same lan or subnet. The host also have to be able to see the same LUN's, Once this is accomplished, you can turn off the old hosts, the new hosts should see the VM's when you browse your LUN's from your new 2.5 VC. All you need to do now is to browse into the folder and right click on the file that ends with VMX and add to inventory. This will install the VM into the new environment. Do this with the rest of your VM's. Now, here you may have to do a Virtual Hardware upgrade if needed. Right click on the VM and if you see Upgrade hardware, do it, if not, power on your VM and update your VMTools. That should do it.

Hope that helped.

[Rubeck]

He needs to upgrade the VMFS too... (or ideally create new VMFS3 LUNs ,and copy/ move the 2.5 VMs to these)

/Rubeck

[SimonHuizenga]

you can use Svmotion to move your machines from the old to the new Lun.

[Rubeck · Accepted solution]

I think that would require the VM to be running on a 3.5 host, which is not possible as the 3.5 host cant run a VM on a VMFS2 volume. (VMFS2 is read-only from a 3.5 host point of view)

/Rubeck

[ChrisLopes]

Dear Guru,

How do I copy the virtual machine files over. Should I copy all the files in a particular over and what utitily can I used to copy.

Tks

[Rubeck]

If you wanna keep it simple, safe and have a big enough time window, you could simply leave the 2.5 hosts as is, build the new 3.5 hosts with new VMFS3 volumes. Download FastSCP http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-fastscp.html. Shut each of the ESX2 VMs down and do a simple ESX to ESX network copy of the VM files..

/Rubeck

[Dave_Mishchenko]

If you have both the ESX 3.5 and 2.5 registered in VirtualCenter then you can

1) Shut down the VMs, right click and select migrate. In the migrate wizard you'll specify to move the files for the VMs.

2) If you have to keep the VMs running, you can use storage vmotion. This will require that the ESX 3.5 host have access to the LUNs where the VMs are stored. See page 37 for this method - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_upgrade_guide.pdf.

[ChrisLopes]

Dear Guru,

Can the folloiwng work.

If the newly setup VC is 2.5 managing esx 3.5 and esx 2.5. Since the VC can see the both ESX Server, my thoughts if the folloiwng can be done.

In the VC, where the storage of the VM reside, I copy the whole virtual machine files on that particular VM and then use the VC to create a new folder on the SAN and copy the old vm to the new SAN Lun.

Is the following possible.

Tks

[ChrisLopes]

Guru,

Is the esx host say for example is 2.02, can it be migrated to esx 3.5 on a new hardware and new SAN just be copying out the file or I need to upgrade to esx 2.52 and above before I can copy out the VMDK File?

Thanks