looking for migration options

[sjesse]

We tried updating our 5.5 update 3b environment to 6.5 and there are errors that are occruing in our that support cannot explain. I have an SR open but I get the feeling the best option is to rebuild the vcenter server. We do have a new 6.5 environment currently setup, the plan was to upgrade our current environment to 6.5, which would allow cross vcenter vmotion. I'm thinking if we need to completely reinstall vcenter from scratch, why shouldn't we just connect the 5.5 hosts to our 6.5 appliance directly? These 5.5 server have standard switches, so the switches should migrate over fine. If this doesn't sound like a good plan, has anyone else tried something similar. We also have SRM installed, so I think these our options

1.)Reinstall vcenter as a 5.5 vcenter. This requires SRM and vSphere replication to be reinstalled

2.)Reinatall vcenter as a 6.5 vcenter. Install SRM and vSphere at the correct levels

3.)Disconnect hosts from 5.5 vcenter and connect to new 6.5 environment.

Thanks for any suggestions

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

You might want to have a read of my article here that gives you some other things to think about when doing a "swing" type migration of existing ESXi hosts from an old vCenter to a net new one.

[sjesse]

Nice article. To touch on your 10 things to consider

1. Custom roles and permissions

I've already copied these, we didn't have that many,

2. Distributed Switch

We currently aren't on a distributed Switch , but the new 6.5 environment I setup has two hosts and they are on a distributed host.  It was one of the reasons we decided to migrated

3. Folders, Resource Pools, Compute/Datastore Clusters

We only have a small management cluster and a few datastore clusters, so losing those won't be that bad. I have new versions of those in the new 6.5 enviornment we could just storage migrate them to those new datastores. We need to do that anyway to get onto the vmfs 6 file system

4. ESXi version compatibility

We are running 5.5 update 3b which falls under what vcenter can manager

5. Hardware support (compute, storage, network)/6. Firmware updates

Our current blades are at the correct firmware, and both environments are in the same ucs chassis and both connect to the same storage. We maintain a compability matrix so I don't see a problem here

7. vSAN, NSX, and other VMware solutions

Currently the only vmware product that applies is SRM and vRealize operations manager. I currently have SRM 6.5 already setup in our new enviornment and working. I'll just have to resetup the protection plans , we would have to have done that anyway

8. Plug-ins

We only had netapps vsc, which isn't criticle, we have to wait for a new version anyway since there plugin doesn't support the vmfs 6 filesystem yet

9. SEAT data

Not a concern we use both vRealize and Foglight for monitoring, so historical data is there if we need it.

10. Backup, replication, and monitoring

We have commvault setup in the new environment

I appreciate the feedback, the article you have, also makes me thing moving the hosts this way is the best idea as well. I'm thinking we will move the hosts, migrate the virtual machines to newly installed 6.5 hosts once they are connected, then we will reinstall the hosts fresh and connect them again.