move VMs from one Vcenter to another.

[mdamda]

Hi i have 10 esxi hosts and i am using VCenter 5.5.

I am refreshing my all my hardware and i want come up with VCenter 6.I am using Distributed switch also.

I have installed VCenter 6 and I have installed 2 new ESXi 6 hosts.

How do i move the virtual machines from old VCenter 5.5 to the New VCenter 6.

Experts guide me.

[snekkalapudi]

You should be able to temporarily add older ESXi hosts to vCenter 6.0.

Migrate VMs from older ESXi hosts to new ESXi 6 hosts provided you have enough compute & storage on ESXi 6 hosts.

Other option >If you are fine with downtime on VMs and VMs are available on shared storage, then you can simply unregister VMs from older ESXi hosts and register the same to newer ESXi 6 hosts

[vThinkBeyondVM]

I do agree with Suresh.

Further reading (This is applicable to vCenter 6.0 😞 http://vthinkbeyondvm.com/want-to-vmotion-a-vm-from-one-vcenter-server-to-another-vcenter-using-vsph...

[mdamda]

The way i am planning is

I will install new vcenter server 6. I will add two new esxi hosts in the new vcenter.

I will exports Distributed switch configuration from old vcenter and import in the new.

I will disconnect two esxi hosts from old vcenter server and add them in the new vcenter server because my storage is the same and i have mapped same LUNs on the new esxi hosts

I will migrate the VMs from old esxi hosts to the new ones and then i will remove the old esxi hosts. In the similar way i will proceed for the other.

When i disconnect esxi hosts from old vcenter and add in the new vcenter will there be any impact or downtime at that .

Do i need to disable any feature likes DRS or so. Experts guide me.

[snekkalapudi]

Sounds good to me. You can simply disconnect the older ESXi hosts and add it to the new vCenter Server. No need to worry about the HA & features. You should not have any downtime on the VMs. They should continue to run on the ESXi host even when disconnected from vCenter

[mhlobon]

ola

i'm new in this VmWare platform, i have installed vCenter Server 6.5 on my staging environment and the production environment is vCenter 5.5. i have created VM's running Win Server 2012 with 4 VM disks each. now i want to move these VM's to the 5.5 environment, but i'm struggling. first is this possible, and if so then how do i go about it?

thnx:::: you would have save my life

[SureshKumarMuth]

I still doubt the distributed switch part. For migrating the host from one vc to another with vds , you can refer the steps in following article

Moving an ESX/ESXi host with vDS from one vCenter Server to another (1029498) | VMware KB