Migrate from vCenter 4.1 to 5 on other hardware

[JonasHolm]

Hi

I have a vCenter server running on Windows 2008 x64 on old hardware and I want to migrate the vCenter server to another hardware running Windows 2008 R2.

The source server database is running on MS SQL Express and I want the new server to run on MS SQL Express.

In the dokumentation for vCenter 5.0 it says to use datamigration tool if the source is running MS SQL Express but when I try I get

"[WARNING] VMware vCenter Server does not satisfy migration prerequisite Do you want to continue backup...? y|n:"

If I answer y I get another simular question about Update Manager and Orhestrator and if I answer y on both questions I get an error

"[ERROR] Error: vCenter Server, VMware Update Manager or VCO did not satisfy migr
ation prerequisites
[ERROR] Exiting..."

All vmware services are stopped on the server...

What am I doing wrong?

Best regards

Jonas

[vannyx]

i pretty much did the same thing and i kind of am in the same boat trying everything.   I called support for help because this vcenter also handled our production servers ( the mistake i made was i  didnt backup the database ).

I read the documentation on the vmware site and several blogs, collectively i may have 60 vms on 5 to 8 hosts and my database size was around 2.5 gigs for the database and 500 megs for the log files.

I tried to upgrade directly from 4.1 to 5 and it failed with the sql script error.  Looked up the KB and it said i didnt to increase the growth size of the DB.  That got me to the point that i could try to install again and that didnt work.

called vmware support got a guy named christopher who in my opinion wanted to be done with this call since it was 4pm on a friday afternoon.

he webex into my system and said the first issue was that i was running sql express and that too many databases were on the system.  He said i sohuld make vcenter a vm and start over from stratch, i had the full version of SQL 2005 on the system (enterprise infact).  The system had plenty of resources and the biggest resource user was vcenter 4.1 ( it was also a backup server).

we backed up the old data base , created a new one deleted the old instance and brought a new instance online.  Went through the setup process  and this time after in installed tomcat and then some link service it stopped saying that it was interrupted.

So he told me to start over from scratch.  I really dont care about the performance information i need  my dvswitch configurations. for a cluster i have, this cluster is connected to 6 different vlans and the wiring is complex i really dont want that messed with.

i am enclosing my log files ( which have no been of any help to me) any help that can be provided would be great.)

i then waited on the phone from 5:15 to 5:50 while he looked for someone to take over the case so he could go home.

i was so dissapointed at that point i said lets do it monday.  But over the weekend i continued to work on it.

i provisioned a new physical server and installed SQL 2008 R2 enterprise, restored the db from the backup he did , created the user , did the odbc connection and went through the setup, it installed all the services and failed because vcenter did not start.  ive searched everywhere but i dont know what to do at this point.  I can blank the database and readd the small number of hosts that i have but then i have 4 esx hosts with dv switch and i would rather not have to reconstruct that.

is their a manual way to check and update the database ?

Thank you.

[jorgus]

George Parker wrote:

Hi jorgus,

So let me see if I've got what you did correct:-

[ ... ]

Hi George,

Yes, I guess that's exactly what I did. You also need to copy a certificate file (or a few files) to another 'ficticious' directory on the new "vc5" server. You wil be told which dir it is after you select the existing database. I can't remember the exact directory name now, I'm afraid.

As it comes to statistics, a perfectly random 😉 sample chart dates back to August 2010 in the yearly view, which is when I installed my vCenter  4.1. As I have said previously, the old vCenter was XP 64 bit in a  Hyper-V virtual machine (surprise! 😉 ), which it turned out to be completely lame (no proper VSS support and no live snapshot backups with Microsoft DPM 2010).

But you are right, the server status has some alerts. I see that there are some problems due to the temporary machine name at the time when vCenter 5 was being installed (vcenter5). There are some alerts saying that its unable to retrieve health data from https://vcenter5.mydomainname/, which is indeed not valid any longer. The name was changed to "vcenter" (the original vCenter 4.1 server name) after the installation and initial verification. There are indeed some links to articles covering the server name issue with regards to reinstall, but I couldn't be bothered to read them 😉 I think the best way would be to rename the old vCenter first and do the fresh install on a machine named exactly like the old one. I only gave it the same IP address as the old one (and changed it on the old one first).

I need to sort out the red alerts now... Although it otherwise works fine 😉

[jorgus]

Hi again George,

I found two https links with my old name in Administration -> vCenter Server Settings -> Advanced Settings. I've sifted through registry as well, but found not much there. To make vCenter Service Status greener you need to get rid of vCenter Converter status (surprise, the Converter plugin is gone, but the status is still there!). A nice chap kindly blogged on how to do that:

          http://blog.alanrocks.com/?p=171

I'm still left with a number of red status services, namely:

• vCenter Inventory Service (there still is a link with my temporary server name there, should have really named it properly at the beginning)
• All License Services nodes (no idea why, no messages; maybe of some unused 4.1 licenses I still have there?)
• VMware vSphere Profile-driven Storage Service (Unable to retrieve health data from http://localhost/sps/health.xml)

If you could share some ideas coming from your struggle, that would be helpful

[gparker]

Hi jorgus,

Thanks for the information.

You wouldn't believe it but my "vc4" server ended up almost dieing. I fortunately had a backup of the VCDB and SSL directory from it., so I installed SQL-2008-R2 on "vc5", restored the VCDB onto it ok and installed vCenter 5, telling it to upgrade the database. I saw that pop-up message about the SSL certs that you mentioned previously and I copied them into the directory it told me to and the installation completed ok. I launched my vSphere Client, logged in and all my historial performance stats are there 🙂 When I went to vCenter Service Statyus though, the screen is completely blank. If I go to the Hardware Staus tab of any of the ESX hosts, that screen is also completely blank! I didn't look at the vCenter Server Settings under Administration though. I wish I'd have read your post before leaving site! I'm sure there are fields in there pointing to "vc4" still. My "vc5" has a different hostname and IP address to my "vc4". I guess I should have started out by renaming vc5 to vc4 before installing vCenter 5. I'll go back and take a look at those Advanced settings later, but everything else seems to be ok.

George.

[jorgus]

The new server name is crucial in this operation. I gave up trying to get rid of that 'VCENTER5.mydomainname' from the server status to no avail. Whatever i changed in ADAM, it came back. I even dumped the whole database to text files and searched for it. Found the name in 2 tables, changed, but it still did not help.

So in the middle of the night I gave it another brave go. I snapshotted my vCenter 5 VM and uninstalled all vCenter 5 components (I left the vSphere client, but it does not count I guess ;-). Then I went back to square one - restored the old vCenter 4.1 DB from the backup (which I luckily still had 😉 ) onto the SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, which was still there with the DB of the uninstalled vCenter 5. Then I did the installation again. The ODBC entry was already there, I've done it so many times now that it went very smoothly 😉 Strangely it now did not ask for the SSL certificates - maybe that's because the server name matched that of the old vCenter 4.1.

Amazingly my dvSwitch got over it, despite it had already been upgraded from the previous vCenter installation and it couldn't possibly match the one from the old vCenter DB. It needed another "upgrade", though as I said the hosts had already had it upgraded once. There were some port mismatches because the dump was a few days old and there were some new machines added etc, but it healed itself using some super cow powers I suppose.

Now it is MUCH greener in the service status! Just need to remove the references to vCenter Converter again, reinstall Update Manager and that will hopefully help me to make the status nice and green 🙂

[Update]

After a few sleepless nights I ended up with green service status! 🙂 To be completely honest it's not 100% green yet, because there are some yellow/orange signs due to holes in my performance statistics. That is because I started over with a vCenter 4.1 database that was a few days old, so obviously the stats gathered by the already burried previous incarnation of my vCenter 5.0 got missing in action.

[gparker]

I've been distracted this week with other work, but I'll be re-visiting my new vCenter 5 server next Monday. I'll go through the Advanced settings and replace any references to the old vCenter 4.1 hostname/ip address the vCenter 5's name/ip info and hopefully this will bring back the vCenter Service Status and Hardware tab information.

George.

[jorgus]

I don't think you'll be able to fix it, but I wish you good luck!   After all those sleepless nights I've learnt that you just need to do the VC5 install on a server with the name and IP of the VC4.1 one.