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jasmeetsinghsur
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Migration of virtual machines from vcenter 6.0 to vcenter 6.7 with new esxi hardware.

We have a current production infra vsphere 6.0 with old esxi & storage infra. We have build a new vsphere infra with vcenter 6.7, new esxi hardwares to 6.7 and storage array. There is no storage communication between the current & new infra. We are looking for the possibility of migration the virtual machines from the current to new infra which could be a cold/hot migration. Both the sites have different SSO domain hence ELM is not support. Kindy suggest the requirements

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Moderator: Thread moved to the vSphere area.


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berndweyand
Expert
Expert

the easiest way is - when its possible -  to have one datastore in common between both infrastructures - either new datastore to old infra or vice versa.

then you can shutdown the vms, storage-vmotion to the shared datastore, unregister the vm in old vcenter, register in new vcenter and startup

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Lalegre
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hello jasmeetsinghsuri​,

As there are no communication between storage arrays i would suggest adding the existing ESXi 6.0 hosts in a new cluster or the existing cluster into the new vCenter. Once you added the ESXi hosts you can hot migrate the VM or cold migrate them depending the CPU family compatibility between the new and old ones ESXi.

If you are using VDS in the vCenter 6.0 i recommend you to first migrated from VDS to VSS and then disconnects the ESXi from vCenter one by one and adding them on the new vCenter. if you are unsure of these steps you could give us more details like the hardware you are using, CPU Compatibility, network connectivity, etc.

ZibiM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Update old environment to at least 6.5u2

Use cross center vmotion fling

Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility | VMware Flings

Requirements:

vcenter to vcenter compatibility (hence 6.5 u2 at least)

network communication for both mgmt and vmotion traffic

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jasmeetsinghsur
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I think cross vCenter vMotion support 6.0 and higher, however, I am not sure about any other limitations and requirements as it failed in my case.

A brief about my Infra.

Current Infra.

vCenter Server 6.0

ESXi hosts : 6.0

New proposed Infra.

vCenter Server: 6.7 u3

ESXi hosts: 6.7 u3

> No direct storage communication between ESXi hosts managed under both the vCenter Servers

> vCenter is part of different SSO domain

Could you please let me know about the requirements for the cross vcenter vMotion utility to work in my case.

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ZibiM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Separate SSO domains are not a problem

Check this KB for the requirements

VMware Knowledge Base

Few things to consider from this KB:

The cross vCenter Server and long distance vMotion features require an Enterprise Plus license

When using the vSphere APIs/SDK, both vCenter Server instances may exist in separate vSphere Single Sign-On domains.

  • 8000 and 902 for vMotion and NFC between ESXi
  • 443 between both vCenter Servers

This is something to confirm, but it may be enough to upgrade just your old vCenter from 6.0 to 6.5 u2 in order to enable cross vcenter to 6.7 u3.

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nachogonzalez
Commander
Commander

I agree with Lalegre​ adding 6.0 hosts to the 6.7 vCenter seems like the reasonable option.

Other Options include vSphere Replication, Veeam replication, HCX or exporting VMs as OVF.
Hope that works

Warm regards

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jasmeetsinghsur
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We have upgraded the vCenter to 6.7 and created a new cluster, added the esxi 6.7. For cross cluster vMotion we have presented L2 network connectivity between the vm network & vMotion connectivity between the esxi hosts. Just want to ask here do we need network connectivity between the esxi hosts for the storage migration to happen since it not a shared storage. Also how the storage blocks are copied between source & destination esxi?

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

... added the esxi 6.7.

Is this a typo, i.e. did you mean the 6.0 host here, so that all hosts are managed by the same vCenter server?

Storage connectivity is not required. VMs can be migrated without shared storage, even online if the source, and target hosts' CPU are compatible.

Unless I'm mistaken, the network that's used depends on whether you migrate a VM online/hot (powered on), or offline/cold (powered off). For cold migrations it's the Management network (by default) that's used, for hot migration it's the vMotion network. If required, you may configure dedicated provisioning VMkernel ports for cold migrations. See e.g. "Network Traffic for Cold Migration" at Cold Migration

André

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jasmeetsinghsur
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Yes, you are correct. We added 6.0 esxi hosts on 6.7 vcenter server managing 6.7 esxi hosts. Does it mean for a hot vMotion between esxi hosts on difference clusters without shared storage, the storage is migrated on vMotion vmk network? If yes, is there any way to check the traffic flow through the command line. Any official document my VMware would be a great help here.

Thanks

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

I'm not sure whether this is covered somewhere in the documentation, but you can find a couple of blogs which deal with network usage for vMotion.

Anyway, you can easily check the network usage using esxtop from the host's CLI. pressing "n" will switch to the network usage screen.

André

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jasmeetsinghsur
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Got a KB vSphere vMotion Networking Requirements

The disk blocks are migrated over the vMotion Network when performing cross cluster vMotion. If this is the case then the ESXi's NFC protocol is handling such traffic over vMotion network. I will check to see the packet flow through ESXTOP and confirm in case there is any doubt. Thanks

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Moderator: Please do not start duplicate threads on the same topic.

I noticed you created a second thread on the same day as this one, that thread has now been archived.


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Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
VMware Training & Certification blog