How to migrate vCenter 5.5 from Win 2008 to vCenter 6 Appliance

[rtausch2]

Hello All!

I would like to manually do the migration as outlined in the subject line for a medium sized company and I have seen the disclaimer on the VCS to VCSA migration tool that indicates the converter is experimental and not for production use. I want to stay on the sage side. So I have the base vCenter 6 built. I'm sure I will need to do screen shots of custom settings from the active vCenter such as alerts, move HA/DRS settings over, add the hosts to the new vCenter, and create the clusters, etc, but does anyone have a list of steps to do this and the items to look for so that I can make this go smoothly? Instructions or anything would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

RT

[coolcrushier]

Hi,

You can take a look at the below link. This is a experimental tool, but the tools works great.

VCS to VCVA Converter – VMware Labs

Regards

Coolcrushier

[rtausch2]

Yeah, we looked at that migration appliance and decided that since VMware wouldn't support it, we didn't want to take a chance.

[RanjnaAggarwal]

Check this link as this possible through VMware Flings

http://www.vladan.fr/vcs-to-vcva-converter/

VCS to VCVA Converter – VMware Labs

[SavkoorSuhas]

Direct migrate and upgrade from 5.5 Win to 6.0 appliance is not possible I believe. You need to use the VCS to VCSA fling to convert it to 5.5 appliance and then upgrade it to 6.0

Suhas

[rtausch2]

What about moving hosts, other information, clusters, license, over from 5.5 on Windows to the vcsa 6 appliance? That's what I need. The Migration appliance that people are talking about states that it is not for production use and experimental and VMware Support themselves told me it is not supported. And I am doing this in a global production environment. So I need to do everything manually.  Has anyone done that?

RT.

[john_its]

Hi,

I once had a Win vCenter that could not boot. So instead of spending hours on how to fix that, we setup a VCSA and connect the hosts to this one. It took some time to configure everything, but there was no downtime even though the original vcenter was long gone.

I would follow the below steps

1. build a new vcenter (I did not mind that it had different ip), with datacenter and cluster.

2. Disable from the old vcenter HA and DRS to avoid any VM restarts etc.

3. disconnect the 1st host from the old cluster and remove him from inventory.

4. Connect that host to the new vcenter and cluster.

5. Repeat steps 3 & 4 for each host.

That way all VMs should stay powered on and continue to work normally without any issues, and you will have both vcenters up so you can configure everything as it was.

I did not had to go through step 3 because the old vcenter took care of that for me.

Please make sure that if you have any other services connected to vcenter, follow the best practices guide for migration for that service.

Also you have to be a bit more careful if you have vDS  as networking and not standard switches

Regarding the license, I think that it is different for version 6 and it won't accept the one from 5.5. If you check the my.vmware.com portal under licenses you should see the proper key in there.

Thanks

John

[rtausch2]

Hello John, I really appreciate the time you took to write this out and knowing you had done this before makes it that much better. Yes, I found an article on moving hosts with vDS...where it says you have to convert the vDS to a standard switch before moving and then prep the new vCenter with vDS implementation before moving so little by little, everything is coming together.

Thanks again,

RT

[Schaedle]

This is exactly that what I am doing at the moment. Start from scratch and moving the ESXis one by one to the new vCenter. It took a long time to accept that it's the best way.

Wolfgang

[john_its]

Hi RT,

Just pay attention like I mentioned to any other services that might be connected to the existing vcenter.

You may have to do additional steps in order to disconnect and reconnect them to the new vcenter or you might have to do some manual work in order for some things to continue to work.

Do not neglect this.

Thanks