VM's from old vCenter 5.0 (with 2 ESXi 5.0) to new vCenter 7.0 (with 2 ESXi 7.0)

[naveenbaldwa1]

Hello

I want to move VM's from old vCenter 5.0 (with 2 ESXi 5.0) to new vCenter 7.0 (with 2 ESXi 7.0), please let me know what are the options i have and what is the best one? Please help.

Thanks in advance!

[continuum]

Do both systems coexist right now or do you plan to use the existing hardware for the new setup ?
May I ask for the reason to change from something that can be operated with a solid Windows application (vSphere-client) to a buggy webinterface ? .... just curious ....

Anyway - if the existing 5.0 VMs dont use snapshots and all vmdks are located in the same directory of the vmx-file - then the most failsafe approach is to tar-gzip the complete directory. Then copy over the tgz-archive to the new hosts.
Some folks may recommend to use the export/import OVA procedure. That basically does the same as the first approach but often fails due to bugs in the import / export implementation.

If you have shared storage between both systems just copy the vmx-files and clone the vmdks with vmkfstools -i.

Ulli

[basteku73]

Yes, I suggest export/import OVA, just try. 

From my experience, the problem is usually with importing to standalone host, but rather no problems importing to vcenter. 

Of course VMs should be stoped. 

Regars, 

Sebastian

[naveenbaldwa1]

could you please share vmkfstools command to copy VM's from old to new vcenter. FYI, I got new hardware and want to move everything there.

[continuum]

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/source-datastore/source-directory/source-vmdk.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/target-datastore/target-directory/target-vmdk.vmdk -d thin

If you prefer other provisioning options look up the options for the -d parameter.

Ulli