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JustyC
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vCenter 5 guests to vCenter 6

Looking for options to move guests from ESX 4.0 hosts managed by vCenter 5.0 to a new vCenter 6.0 environment.  We do not want to upgrade the ESX 4.0 hosts as the hardware is old and will be taken out of service.  vCenter 5 doesn't see the same SAN storage as the vCenter 6.   I know we can use the VMware Converter, but guests need to be powered down.  Using vMotion between vCenters is not possible.  CPUs in  the 4.0 hosts are AMD....... CPUs in the vSphere 6 hosts are Intel.  Ideally we don't want any down time for the 140 guests.  Can anyone offer some other options ?  Thanks in advance. 

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nparas5
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Downtime is needed though but you can minimize the same by converting the VM to OVF and the deploy the same on your new environment.

In OVF deployment the downtime will be less, the VM will be up during OVF template deployment and once you deploy the file on new vCenter you can uncheck the NIC connect option , once it is deployed only downtime needed is to interchange the IP by shutting down old running machine and configuring the same IP on new one.

NOTE: Make sure to create local admin password first before exporting ovf.

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nparas5
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Downtime is needed though but you can minimize the same by converting the VM to OVF and the deploy the same on your new environment.

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a_p_
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I'm afraid that there's no way to avoid downtime, especially when migrating between different CPU vendors.

What I could think of to minimize downtime, is that you create a "transfer" LUN on the new storage system, and present it to one of the old hosts, as well as one of the new hosts. This way you could migrate the VM's one-by-one to the new LUN, power it off, and remove it from the old vCenter Server's inventory, add it to the new vCenter Server's inventory, power it on (and adjust settings, update VMware Tools, virtual hardware, ...), and finally migrate it to other hosts and LUNs.

André

nparas5
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Downtime is needed though but you can minimize the same by converting the VM to OVF and the deploy the same on your new environment.

In OVF deployment the downtime will be less, the VM will be up during OVF template deployment and once you deploy the file on new vCenter you can uncheck the NIC connect option , once it is deployed only downtime needed is to interchange the IP by shutting down old running machine and configuring the same IP on new one.

NOTE: Make sure to create local admin password first before exporting ovf.

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