High level plan/design for how to proceed with Online Migration of Virtual Data Center

[shankarsingh]

Hi Team,

Please can you guide/suggest  me high level plan/design for how to proceed with Online Migration of Virtual Data Center since we have currently vCloud setup which are having IBM server and IBM Storage, now we planned to replace the IBM server and Storage  with Cisco UCS C series server and EMC Storage respectively .

So we need to have live migration to new esxi host and Storage. As we have already installed ESXi host on new host and kept in MM in Vcenter

Current setup

vCenter Version : 5.5.0

Esxi Host: IBM

Storage Connected to Host : IBM (SAN)

vCloud Director : 8..0.0

VMware vShiled Manager : 5.5.4.

Two distributed switch(VXLAN and External) in vCenter

Appreciate your help and assistance .

Happy new year .

Thanks in advance.

[Sreec]

AFAIK there is no online migration step available in this case because you are changing Both Hosts&Storage . I would follow below steps

1. Unregister all vCloud VM's from VC(Specific to your VDC)

2. Wipe out VDC from vCloud (Starting with the vapps,edges...all the way to VDC)

3. Check and perform a Storage level migration between IBM and EMC arrays

4. Mount EMC Lun's to UCS servers and register the VM back to VC

5.Prepare VXLAN for new UCS cluster

6.Create VDC in vCloud Director for new cluster and export your VM's to VDC.

[Exwork]

Assuming you control the environment, the migration should be possible.

First is migrating VMs to the new hosts:

- Connect the new hosts to the old datastores on the old SAN.

- Create new datastores on the new SAN, and connect the new hosts to them.

- Connect the new hosts to the current distributed switch(es), so that VMs will still have connectivity.

- Add the new hosts into the existing cluster.

- Put the old hosts into maintenance mode, in order to migrate the current VMs to the new hosts. The VMs still be running on the old SAN at this point.

Next is migrating the storage. You can do this in two different ways:

1. Add new datastores into the current storage DRS cluster and put the old ones into maintenance mode.

2. Make a new storage DRS cluster, and change the storage profiles for all the vApps/VMs to use it. This will require more work, but may be a better option.

As long as you are using the same vCenter server, same vCloud environment, and that you can connect the new hosts to the old SAN, this should be able to be done live.

Alternatively, you could connect the old hosts to the new SAN, instead of connecting the new hosts to the old SAN.

Make sure you test this with a test cluster first before migrating anything production!