Consequences of moving vCenter to a new machine on vCD provider resources and deployed environments

[hgov]

Hi,

We recently upgraded our vCenter server and ESXi hosts to version 6 from 5.1 and our vCD server to version 5.5.6.

One step that I would have liked to also done was to change the vCenter server to a new Windows 2012R2 server. (from Windows 2008 R2)

This moving vCenter to a new server was not attempted due to the unknown repercussions that may occur within vCloud-Director.

Hopefully someone out there has been through this and can provide either a link to the information or the information itself.

Current Setup:

vCenter 6.02 on a physical server with all resources being attached to the vCD instance (Storage, memory, networking, CPU's etc...)

Multiple vApp's have been deployed from vCD and are running on the resources provided by the vCenter (there are also multiple catalog vApps saved)

What I would like to achieve is moving vCenter to a new virtual server and attaching the ESXi hosts and resources that are currently managed by the physical vCenter server. Then remove vCenter from the physical server remove it from the environment. It would be beneficial if this can be done with little or no impact on the current vCD environment. From what I understand, removing the current physical vCenter would also remove all the resources from vCD and this would effectively require that all resources would have to be added from the new virtual vCenter (even though they would be the same resources from the ESXi servers).

I am thinking that all vCD configurations and vApp's would have to be re-created but I am hoping that is not the case.

Any assistance or guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks in Advance.

Henry

[Exwork]

You're just trying to move vCenter from a physical server to a virtual one, correct?

You should be able to just back up the current vCenter server (certificates, config, database, etc), and then install vCenter on the new server.

The name of the vCenter server would have to stay the same, but this shouldn't otherwise affect vCloud, since it's just a backup and restore.

[hgov]

Hi,

Firstly, thank you very much for the response. I have also opened a ticket VMWare support in hopes they have a painless solution.

The server name will have to be different in our case since the physical server will remain as the backup and management server for other solution resources. From the articles I have found so far it appears that the VCD resources would have to be removed from VCD (forced by the removal of the original vCenter). Then once the ESXi hosts were attached to the new virtual vCenter the resources would have to be re-assigned to the VCD server. At this point I believe this would require the recreation of all the current vApp environments and networking components.

I am still hoping there is a less destructive solution since recreation of all vApp's and associated networking would be time consuming and painful task.

Thanks,

Henry