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Ivanhoe1
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Migrate from vCenter 5.1 to VCSA 6.5

Hi,

I´m about to migrate guests from an old 5.1 environment to an new one with vcenter and hosts with 6.5.

I was think about disconnect the host from the old and add the to the new vcenter but was supprised when i tried to connect the old 5.1 hosts to the new 6.5 vcenter and it said that ESXi 5.1 is not supported (5.5 or later).

So do I  need to upgrade my old evironment to 5.5 or is there any other easier way to live migrate the guests to my new vcenter and hosts?

Thanks in advance!

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rcporto
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No, there is no way to live migrate virtual machines from hosts managed by different vCenters, exept for vCenter 6.x new cross-vCenter vMotion, but both vCenter (and hosts) should be version 6.0 or later.

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

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rcporto
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Do you want migrate the hosts and the virtual machines or just the virtual machine, because if you want just the virtual machines and uses shared storage, you can map the old volumes to your new hosts, shutdown the virtual machines on the old vCenter, and on the new vCenter register the virtual machines, power on the virtual machines on the new hosts and then storage vMotion to the datastores.

But, if you really want migrate the host as well, you will really need upgrade your old environment to version 5.5 or later, since like you already know, a vCenter 6.5 cannot manage a host 5.1.

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Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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Ivanhoe1
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Hi,

No the problem is that I don´t want to take down the guests, i would like to migrate them with no downtime.

I have shared storage.

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rcporto
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Assuming your new hosts have different hardware (CPU), I'm not sure if that will be possible. But you may can try enable EVC in your new cluster to the same level of your old cluster. But again, to avoid downtime you will really need to add your hosts to the new vCenter and for that all your old environment should be a version 5.5 or later.

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Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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Ivanhoe1
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No EVC. vCenter tells me that ESXi 5.1 hosts is not supported and cant be added so there´s nothing to do on that. Question is if there is any other way except upgrading the hosts to 5.5 or turn off the guest and move them?

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rcporto
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No, there is no way to live migrate virtual machines from hosts managed by different vCenters, exept for vCenter 6.x new cross-vCenter vMotion, but both vCenter (and hosts) should be version 6.0 or later.

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Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
Ivanhoe1
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ok, so its not possible to install another vcsa with 6.0 and add the 5.1 hosts to it and then link that vcsa to the vcsa 6.5 and migrate the guests? The hosts must have ESXi 6.0 too for the extended vmotion should work?

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rcporto
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To use enhanced linked mode you will need vCenters at the same version, you cannot link a vCenter 6.0 with a 6.5.

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