Hello Lou,

we migrated vCenter from 4.0 U2 on Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 x86 (VM) to vCenter 4.1 on Windows Server 2008 R2 (VM). The Database, a MS SQL Server 2005 SP4 was on the same Machine as vCenter 4.0 U2 and we wanted to migrate only the vCenter Server to 2008 R2. We snapshoted the old Server and then began to migrate with the help of the Data Migration Tool from VMware. We haven´t backed up and restored the ADAM Database, maybe the Data Migration Tool did that for us?

If you install vCenter from scratch than you loose, among other things, your custom defined Alarms, custom Permissions, Resource Pools, VM Folders, Performance Data and if you utilize virtual Distributed Switches for Networking you will also have (a lot?) work restoring the VDS or getting them in the new vcenter. Especially the VDS point would be a show stopper for us. But maybe there is a KB Article out there which describes the import from the old vds config to the new vCenter without to much hassle.

The HA and DRS settings are easy to restore manually, if you haven´t gone wild and configured a lot of DRS and HA rules. Simply take Screenshots of the Cluster Settings.

Whish you all the best for your upgrade/migration.

Best Regards,

Bjoern