Backing up VMs hosted on 5.5 update 1 and restoring to different hosts running 5.5 Update 3a

[shane1973]

Hello,

  We're moving a customer from their on-prem environment to our cloud platform. They are running ESX 5.5 Update 1 (1623387) and our environment is 5.5 Update 3a (3116895)

We don't really want to put them on 5.5 Update 1 because there are many bug fixes in 5.5 Update 3a that are important to have.

We're backing up the VMs using Asigra, then restoring to our environment and using Zerto to capture changes until the go-live. It's basically a 1-way DR failover to our infrastructure. We're just vetting out any problems putting the VMs onto our hosts with a different version of ESXi.

Any htoughts are appreciated.

Oh, and I believe we are also using a new install of vCenter on our side also.

[mhampto]

The VM's should not care as long as the environment they are going to is the same configuration.

A couple things I have seen be an issue:

• Networking: The same names should be used otherwise the VM's will need to be reconfigured before powering on.
• CPU: If the new environment has newer hardware, EVC will be needed to present the same vCPU to the VM's.

[shane1973]

The Zerto solution worked great. Our customer is back up and running. vCenter is showing that VMtools are out of date, so we're scheduling an outage to upgrade those. I didn't see your response before we did the migration.  We used our traditional naming convention, and there doesn't appear to be any issues.  Backups are a pain to get going because of all the data needed for the initial seed.