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Chris_Knapp
Contributor
Contributor

Moving virtual machines to new location

Good morning,

I have 3 hosts running ESX 3.5. I need to migrate some of these VMs to a new farm (ESXi 5.0) that is in a different location/different SAN. Some of these VMs have RDM LUNs attached that would need to move as well, but they can be reattached as virtual disk at the new location. What would be the best option to migrate these?

Thank you

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DanielOprea
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Hello,

To make a vmotion and svmotion must perform the following steps:

1 - Turn off the VM.

2 - Remove and delete the VM from disk RDM

3 - Check that you are ONLY local disks (virtual disk)

4 - Make the "Storage VMotion" and VMotion the VMs.

5 - Make the RDMs in the same order as the you had (same SCSI controller 1.X or 2.X, etc)

6 - Start the VMs.

7 - If boots correctly, and S.O. see the disks and everything is OK. Back to shutdown the VM.

8 - Make the upgrade the VM hardware.

9 - Start the VM and performs the update of vmtools.

10 - Restart the VM

Done!

PLEASE CONSIDER AWARDING any HELPFUL or CORRECT answer. Thanks!!
Por favor CONSIDERA PREMIAR cualquier respuesta ÚTIL o CORRECTA. ¡¡Muchas gracias!!
Blogs: https://danieloprea.blogspot.com/
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Chris_Knapp
Contributor
Contributor

Daniel,

Thank you for the info. How would I storage vmotion since this is moving to a completely separate location?

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Ethan44
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi

Welcome to communities.

you may export to external usb drive and import over there .

http://www.vladan.fr/plug-in-the-external-usb-drive-to-esx-server-directly-to-backup-or-copy/

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DanielOprea
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Hi,

To be able to perform vmotion storage “” you should have introduced from datastore esx destiny of origin. Or get a view of datastore esx destiny in the background.

That storage do you use? NFS FC, and so on and so forth ISCSI?

You have a network vmtion for it?

PLEASE CONSIDER AWARDING any HELPFUL or CORRECT answer. Thanks!!
Por favor CONSIDERA PREMIAR cualquier respuesta ÚTIL o CORRECTA. ¡¡Muchas gracias!!
Blogs: https://danieloprea.blogspot.com/
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bayupw
Leadership
Leadership

Do you have any vCenter server running?

If yes, do you plan to install a new vCenter or do in-place upgrade?

Migrating to new farms does it means you will have some new servers with 5.0?

For RDM LUNs you can:

- Copy from storage to storage if possible

- Create a LUN on new SAN, present it to old hosts and migrate the Data from guest manually

- Convert the RDM LUNs to VMDK and perform cold migration between SAN

- Convert the RDM LUNs and perform vMotion without Shared Storage vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - Migration with vMotion in Environments Without Shared Storage (requires vCenter 5.1+)

See below links regarding migrating VM with RDM:

Migrating virtual machines with Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) | VMware Support Insider - VMware Blogs

VMware KB:    Migrating virtual machines with Raw Device Mappings (RDMs)

vSphere: Convert RDM to VMDK and vice-versa on Windows VM with no downtime | Robin CM's IT Blog

To perform vMotion & Storage vMotion of the VMs, all the old and new hosts must be added to the same vCenter or a linked mode vCenter.

Based on VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes vCenter 5.0 is compatible with ESX 3.5 U5.

If your ESX are prior 3.5 U5, you can update it to U5 first or install vCenter 4.x first then upgrade the hosts to 4.x

After the hosts are upgraded you can add the 4.x hosts to vCenter 5.0 even vCenter 5.5.

After added you can vMotion & Storage vMotion the hosts from old hosts to new hosts.

Bayu Wibowo | VCIX6-DCV/NV
Author of VMware NSX Cookbook http://bit.ly/NSXCookbook
https://github.com/bayupw/PowerNSX-Scripts
https://nz.linkedin.com/in/bayupw | twitter @bayupw
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Chris_Knapp
Contributor
Contributor

Bayu,

They will be migrate to a new farm that already has a vCenter 5.0 U3 up and running, and I can't upgrade this farm to anything newer without breaking our DR application. I won't be able to present the old array to the new array so I know I'll have to do cold migrations and convert the RDMs to VMFS.

Old farm - ESX 3.5/4.0

New farm - ESXi 5.0 U3

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