Migrating 5.1 VM's to New 6.5 Host

[tmaster]

Hi There,

I have three Dell host machines running 5.1 essentials kit and have purchased three new Dell hosts machines which will use 6.5 essentials kit.

Would someone mind advising best practice to migrate all VM's from the 5.1 hosts to the new 6.5 hosts when we don't have vMotion?

Cheers,

Tmaster100

[daphnissov]

There are a couple of ways to do this without vMotion. If you're using a backup or replication product, you can either perform a backup and restore, or sometimes products have a feature like a "quick migrate" functionality which is essentially an orchestrated copy process. Second method is, assuming you're using shared storage, by presenting a swing datastore to both sets of hosts. By that I mean a shared datastore which is mounted by both 5.1 and 6.5 hosts. Move the VMs to that datastore, unregister them at the source vCenter, and register them at the destination vCenter. This assumes you have separate vCenters, of course.

[vijayrana968]

If you have shared storage architecture, share the same datastore across new hosts > Shutdown VMs > remove from inventory > register VMs on new hosts.

If you don't have shared storage you can convert them into ovf and deploy on new hosts.

[senthilkumarms8]

Option 1 : (If you have shared storage)

• Map the 5.1 environments datastore to 6.5 host.  unregister the VM
• power off and unregister the VM from 5.1 host
• Register the VM back to 6.5 hosts and power on  the VM

Option 2 : (if you don't have shared storage)

• Deploy vSphere replication appliance
• Replicate the VMs from 5.1 to 6.5 environment
• failover the VMs to 6.5

Option 3 : (if you don't have shared storage)

• install P2V converter
• do the V2V from 5.1 to 6.5 hosts