Migrating VMs from a vSphere 6.7 cluster to a new vSphere 7 cluster

[sandroalvesbras]

Hi friends,

I have a cluster with vSphere 6.7 with two hosts and my VMs allocated on a datastore allocated on storage via iSCSI.

We now have a new hyperconvergence environment with three hosts. We know that the hyperconvergence environment has dedicated physical switches for the solution with dedicated VLANs for vSan, vMotion and Lan.

I plan on using one of the vSphere 6. 7 hosts to connect to the vCenter 7 in the hypervconvergence environment and use vMotion to migrate the VMs from the vsphere 6.7 host to the vSphere 7 hosts.

So all migration can take place live.

My doubts are:

1 - Hardware compatibility for live migration. Will it be possible?
2 - Network connectivity, as vSphere 6.7 has different vMotion networks than the new vSphere 7 hosts.
3 - I don't want to include the vSphere 6.7 host in the hyperconverngia cluster because I would probably have a problem with the cluster's vSAN.

What precautions do I need to take?

PS: I made a lab with two nodes (vSphere 6.7 and 7) with a vCenter 7 with VMs on the local disks, but both vSphere are connected on the same vMotion network. The live migration went smoothly.

Thanks.

[a_p_]

>>> 1 - Hardware compatibility for live migration. Will it be possible?
As long as the new hosts are from the same CPU vendor (Intel/AMD), and have the same, or more CPU features, life migration should be possible

>>> 2 - Network connectivity, as vSphere 6.7 has different vMotion networks than the new vSphere 7 hosts.
You'll need to reconfigure the v6.7 host's vMotion network, so that it can communicate with the v7.0 hosts.

>>> 3 - I don't want to include the vSphere 6.7 host in the hyperconverngia cluster because I would probably have a problem with the cluster's vSAN.
No need to have the host in a cluster.

>>> What precautions do I need to take?
Nothing really. It's pretty straight forward. If something's wrong, the vMotion wizard will make you aware of it.

André

[sandroalvesbras]

Hi @a_p_ ,

Understand.

The vSphere 7 cluster has a dedicated vMotion network for it that does not communicate with the vSphere 6.7 host that does not have a vMotion network, it actually uses the production network for vMotion which is not a good practice, but it works .

The vSphere 6.7 host is on the same production network as vSphere 7 to communicate, so what I thought about doing is enabling vMotion on the vSphere 7 production network portgroup also to communicate.

At the end of the migration I return with vMotion to the dedicated network that we created for the cluster.

Or I can use Veeam to do the hot migration, so I don't need to make any changes to the environment.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Does the v6.7 host have only a single NIC? What I'd probably do is to use one of the NICs with a new vSwitch, and create a vMotion portgroup. This way you would't have to do any changes on the new cluster.

André

[sandroalvesbras]

Hi @a_p_ ,

So ... I have a problem!

The VxRail vSphere 7 cluster does not support changing the vMotion network. I can't uncheck the vMotion option from vmkernel.

I tried to do exactly what you suggested, but on the side of VxRail vSphere 7 and he didn't let vMotion show disabled.

Why did I try that? To try to enable vMotion in the Managment vkernel.

On the source side, which is vSphere 6.7, I can create a new one, but this network will not have connectivity with the VxRail vSphere 7 network.

Example:

VxRail vSphere 7
- vkernel Managment - 10.1.0.0
- vkernel vMotion - 172.16.0.0

VSphere Host 6.7
- vkernel Managment and vMotion - 10.1.0.0

Even if I create a vkernel on the vSphere 6.7 host, this network (172.16.0.0) does not exist on the side of the network where vSphere 6.7 is. So for this to work, I would have to create this network on the switch to route between the switches that are connected via uplink.

Or even connect a direct cable between the switches to have a dedicated network.

This at first is not possible, because the switch on the side of vSphere 6.7 is old (old blade) and the team has little knowledge.

In the last case I can use Veeam to do this migration if it is not really possible to make these network configurations.

Am I right?

Thanks.

[a_p_]

Without being able to connect the hosts on the vMotion network, you can always opt to cold migrate the VMs, if you can afford the downtime.
3rd-party tools may of course be also an option.

André

[sandroalvesbras]

Hi, @a_p_ 

We did what you suggested earlier.

The source vSphere 6.7 host had two network cards.

We took one of these cards and put it on the same network as the destination host and routed it through the firewall since we don't have an L3 layer.

That way, all vMotion traffic will be directed to the firewall and it will forward the connection to the other side.

As the firewall is a Pfsense, we dedicate a network card for this routing.

We deactivated Nic de LAN's vMotion and enabled it on dedicated Nic.

This post helped me too.

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-vSphere-Discussions/Migration-of-Two-Separate-VMware-Enviro...

Thanks.