vm migration

[ferexderta]

We have vcenter 5.5, 6, 6.5 and 6.7 Enterprise Plus clusters in our environment. vcenter 6 and 6.5 are running as a vsan cluster. Now I want to migrate them to VxRail on vCenter 7 Enterprise Plus. Which method should we follow and what are the points we should pay attention to? We want to move the vast majority of virtual machines without shutting down.there are a lot of tools, but can someone who has already built such systems recommend their experience and the fastest trouble-free method?

[robc_yk]

I would first look into the possibility of bring all the environments to the same revision. Leads to  much easier troubleshooting should an issue arise, and also easier to manage patches and security releases.

As for VxRail, Here is some information:

Dell VxRail™ Documentation Quick Reference List | Dell Canada

Solved: Migration of Existing VM's to VxRail - Dell Community

Does not sound simple, may want to engage VMWare support.

[ferexderta]

there is no way I can upgrade the old environment to the vcenter 7 suite. but how to move virtual machines there must be a method?

[scott28tt]

Can you give the new hosts access to the old datastores?

Are you retaining your old datastores or also wanting to migrate the VMs to new datastores?

[IRIX201110141]

I deploy VxRail and part of the job is also partial VM migration

1. If old Hosts use iSCSi i configure iSCSI Access on one of the VxRAIL nodes. Customer have to shutdown the VM on the old infrastructure and add it to the new inventory. This solves around when not having EVC or when customer use the inbuild vCenter of the VxRail. After that we perform a svMotion on the up and running VM. Downtime of a VM is around a minute.
2. Forcing one old Host after another as a foreign into the new vCenter by just adding them as stand alone hosts. As general a vCenter Version X only can manage ESXi Version X-2 (example: VCSA 7 can manage ESXi 7, 6.7 and 6.5)

Regards,
Joerg