vRA 7.6 and 8.2 Connecting Same vCenter?

[balawiz]

We have vRA7.6 prod environment running by connecting with Prod vCenter server. Since we don't have test vCenter server can we test the newly created vRA8.2 environment by connecting to same prod vCenter server?

We were trying to find out how much downtime is required for vRA7.6 to 8.2 migration and manual configuration changes/updates required based on testing.

Also, we have external 7.6 vRO and in this case do we have to migrate only to external 8.2 vRO?

[jimmyvandermast]

There is no technical reason why it wouldn't be possible to have 2 vRA environments connected to 1 vCenter.
The only thing to consider is that it would be better not to mix the VM's (e.q. do not modify one VM from both vRA's).

Regarding downtime, it is not an upgrade but a migration.
During the entire migration period, you can have both vRA's up and running.
That is, if you are careful when doing the final onboarding properly.

About vRO, the source vRO will go down for a few minutes at the point where you run the 'vro-migrate' step.
That is when you copy/clone the entire vRO content from vRO7 o vRO8.
My experience is that that will only take minutes and after that you can again have both up.

I am not sure what would be a limitation with external vRO, I guess that does not matter.

[balawiz]

Can we migrate particular business group from source (vRA7.6 prod environment) to vRA8 test environment for some testing and later vRA8 prod environment?

[jimmyvandermast]

You can migrate as many times as you like, in between you can either roll-back, revert vRA8 to snapshots or just re-deploy vRA8.

Just be careful when you migrate the deployments, you cannot roll-back after migrating deployments. But you can then still revert to earlier snaphots of the vRA8 or just re-deploy vRA8 clean.

Also, as expected, when you migrate deployments and destroy a deployment in vRA8, the containing Virtual Machines are also deleted from vCenter. So my advice, don't migrate deployments and don't destroy deployments in vRA8 until you are completely ready to do so.

(there is a fix to remove migrated deployments without deleting the VM's in vRA8.4)

I migrated vRA7.6 to vRA8.3 and 8.4 many times (and then re-deployed vRA8 and migrated again) without any issues.

In the migration pages, you can select what to migrate.