I have a few 2008/ 2012 servers that I need to upgrade to Win2016. Nearly all of them follow the model of having the OS and the DATA partitions on separate data stores. None of them have any domain controller roles. In at least two cases, I want to avoid the down time to backup/copy a couple terabytes of data. I think I can do something like this:
In theory, I don't think I need to power down the new VM prior to adding the data VMDKs, but I'm a cautious fellow.
Did I miss any steps?
Moderator: Moved to Virtual Machine, Guest OS & VM Tools > Windows
I don't think so.
Deploy a net new VM and migrate data.
My Bad, apologies..
Why do you not think so? What is the concern?
From a technical point of view, your plan sounds good to me.
I've done many similar "upgrades" in the past, and what I also did was to rename the VM's files so that all of them match the VM's name in the inventory to prevent future confusion. The easiest way to rename the files is to e.g. storage vMotion the VM after setting the desired name in the inventory.
Please remember that changing file names from the command line will also require manual metadata changes!
André
Sorry if I didn't express me correct. But I wanted to say your plan sounds good.
"Your question: Did I miss any steps?"
"My Answer: I don't think so."