Migrating a large number of VMs between servers

[radman]

I have a single ESX server and VirtualCenter (vSphere 4).

I need to migrate all my VMs (about 30) to a new server I am replacing with. They are all powered off (I use them as testbeds a small number at a time).

For the transition I've added both servers into my vCenter DataCenter. I can migrate each VM individually, but this will be extremely tedious and time consuming.

Can somebody recommend a way for me to initiate moving all the VMs and letting it run for a few days or however long it takes, perhaps via commands to the Service Console or ???

Thanks!

[Kahonu84]

Aloha - This sounds too easy but... If all your VMs are on a separate drive from ESX, why not relocate the drive??

Bill

[radman]

Unfortunately, the drives are part of a RAID array, and were relatively small. Another disturbing thing I'm finding is that when I try to use migrate on some of the VMs, I get errors about "Host CPU is incompatible with the virtual machine's requirements at CPUID level 0x1 register 'eax'" and some odd bitmasks. I'm digging into KB doc 1993 but it sounds like simply copying the machine files or physical disks wouldn't work. I don't understand why this is true for some VMs and not others, however. Very strange.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

As long as the VM's don't have multiple virtual disks on different datastores/folders you should be able to copy the files using e.g. Veeam FastSCP.

If you have disks on different datastores/folders you will need to reconfigure the VM on the target (Edit Settings or edit the VMX file) because of the datastores UUIDs.

Before copying the files over to the new host:

- remove any attached CD/DVD or ISO from the VM

- reset the CPU flags to default, see KB1011294 - A CPU of the host is incompatible error appears ...

André

[radman]

It turned out the problem with the "incompatible host CPU" only applied to machines I had in a suspend state. When I shut them down completely they copied over just fine.

Thanks for the helpful tips, folks.