Migration of Two Separate VMware Environments Best Practices

[AngelC2]

I'm needing assistance in figuring out what's the best approach to the migration of two separate VMware environments.  Here is the breakdown of the environments:

Old Environment:

• vCenter and ESXi hosts are v6.0
• 4 ESXi Nodes in a Cluster
• 1 vCenter Virtual Appliance Server
• Dell Compellent SAN connected to hosts via Fiber

New Environment:

• vCenter and ESXi hosts are v6.0
• 3 ESXi Nodes in a Cluster
• 1 vCenter Virtual Appliance Server
• Dell EMC VxRail vSAN connected to hosts via Fiber

I have two separate VMware environments, old is on a different VLAN than new on the same network.  Both SAN's cannot see each other, isolated on network. If re-configuring the network so that they are on the same VLAN/subnet, can see each other, etc. is not an option...I don't know for sure, just saying if it's not...what is the best approach for me to migrate my VM's and their data over to the new vCenter/Hosts/vSAN?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Angel

[AngelC2]

From Source:

From Destination:

It did this until the max of 30 hops then the following:

[daphnissov]

Does your source host (ESXi03) not correspond to this image?

If not, repeat the traceroute and put in the vmkernel port which corresponds to your vMotion vmkernel.

I can already tell, from the VxRail host, that there is no route in place from its subnet. So you'll need to ensure from those networks that the network of either is routable.

[AngelC2]

This image is for the source host ESXi03.  I ran the traceroute using vmk1 for vMotion as you instructed.

As for the VxRail host, what do you mean specifically in regards to no route being in place from its subnet?  Why can the VxRail ping both the source host IP and vMotion IP if it's not configured properly?

[daphnissov]

traceroute may not have an interface parameter for the source version of your ESXi host. The pings from the VxRail hosts were successful because they were probably going out of the management vmkernel and not the vMotion. So from a high level, you will need to work with your network engineers to provide either a route from source to destination vMotion networks, or reconfigure (and recable, if necessary) vMotion interfaces to be all on the same L2. Barring that, you'll have to do cold migrations.

[AngelC2 · Accepted solution]

Yes, you are 100% correct and that's exactly what I had to do.  I took the information you gave me and presented it to our Network Engineer along with me showing him how our vCenter configurations looked like for both hosts, switches, etc. and from that he was able to determine after troubleshooting what was needed.

It turns out he had to create a route in our Cisco router (gateway) to route traffic to the vMotion network.  I then was able to configure the vMotion adapters and TCP/IP Stack correctly which allowed the vMotion and vStorage Motion to work.  So, overall it wasn't a L3 solution since our network is not configured this way and we didn't want it to route traffic between the two networks using our MX (Firewall).  I'm just trying to explain the best I can based on what I was told and shown, so overall I've definitely learned from this experience so in the end it's all good.

Thank you for all of your help, couldn't of done it without you.