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cjarboe
Contributor
Contributor

Cluster to Cluster Migration

We are getting ready to set up a whole new vDC and will need to migrate about 60 vm's from 2 other clusters to this new one.  Neither currently have shared storage and cannot see each others datastores.  Is there a way to easy migrate everything to the new cluster without any downtime?

Each cluster has it's own vcenter server.

thanks all

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rcporto
Leadership
Leadership

Without downtime in this scenario I think is impossible... since the datastore is not shared, you're migrating to a different vCenter and the hosts are differents.

One possible way is if you remove the hosts from the old vCenter, add to the new vCenter and migrate the virtual machines to the new cluster, since you don't have shared storage you will need use enhanced vMotion to change both host and datastore and the target host need to be compatible (same CPU) with the old one.

---

Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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pratjain
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

If all the clusters are part of one data center in vCenter and you are using vCenter 5.1 and later , you can use XvMotion from web-client

Reference Link - vMotion without shared storage requirement, does it have a name? | VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Blog...

Regards, PJ If you find this or any other answer useful please mark the answer as correct or helpful.
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Alessandro_Stob
Contributor
Contributor

Buongiorno,

Vi comunico che sono in ferie dal 15-12-2014 al 17-12-2014 compreso. Per eventuali problemi chiamare il numero 0352050380 o spedire un'email all'indirizzo helpdesk@project.it.

Distinti Saluti

Alessandro Stobbia Project Informatica Srl Tel. 0352050301

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cjarboe
Contributor
Contributor

They are actually all different datacenters.  I'm just looking for the best way to do the migration with the least amount of downtime.  Thank you for the info

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cjarboe
Contributor
Contributor

Makes sense.  I'm thinking a 2 part migration.  First, connecting our current datacenter to the new datastores and migrating the vm's there.  Then migrate to the new datacenter.

Since the networking will be different, will that method still require me to shut down the vm's and add to the new inventory or can I just do a new host migration?

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RyanH84
Expert
Expert

Hi,


I've done a similar thing with a 5.1 vCenter environment to a seperate new 5.5 vCenter, across two vCenters each in its own data center.

We ended up using shared storage (iSCSI) on certain hosts within each vCenter/cluster.

The process was:

1) Migrate the running VM to the shared storage seen by both hosts/vcenters.

2) Power off the VM

3) Change the VM network label of the VM to a standard switch port group for just VM Traffic, which we named "migration_network".

4) Remove the VM from the Inventory of the vCenter.

5) In the new vCenter, navigate to the shared storage, find the VM and its contents and "Add to Inventory".

6) Once in, edit the VM settings, change the network label to one that will accommodate the VM's traffic from before. We also made changes to RAM reservations and enabled CPU/MEM hot add.

7) Upgrade the VM virtual hardware.

😎 Power on the VM. When/if prompted by vCenter if we moved or copied it, we selected "I moved it".

9) Let the VM come up, depending on the OS it will require some reconfiguration. We also installed new VMware tools and then rebooted.

10) Check services of the guest VM and job is done. (We also used this opportunity to check patch levels and other AV stuff related to our environment).

11) Storage vMotion the VM to new SAN storage available to the new hosts in the new datacenter.

That is from memory, we wrote a guide for all system admins to do this and we all shared out the VM's according to service and let peopple organise downtime and migration.

The actual downtime per VM is less than 10 minutes as most of the work is in the storage vMotion and preparation of actually having downtime. The actual administration effort is quite low.

Hope this helped? Good luck!

Ryan

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Regards, Ryan vExpert, VCP5, VCAP5-DCA, MCITP, VCE-CIAE, NPP4 @vRyanH http://vRyan.co.uk
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ch1ta
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

You can try to use Veeam Free or any other backup tool that provides migration capabilities. The said product has in-built Quick Migration functionality that allows you to migrate VMs with minimal downtime (yep, no downtime doesn’t seem to be possible in your case).

The whole process is pretty straight-forward: add servers, select VMs, initiate Quick Migration.

Cheers.

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