Migrating VM's with Snapshots

[chester78]

I am in the planning stages of a ESX 3.5/VC 2.5 upgrade to vSphere. This is going to be a "rolling" upgrade, so lots of VM migrations will be taking place. We are on all local storage, so migrations will be across datastores.

Unfortunately my shop uses snapshots very heavily. I'm aware of the issues created when migrating VM's with snapshots across datastores. My question is, does using VMware Converter make this possible? If I can avoid having to delete all snapshots, that would be a huge bonus. I can't seem to find a definitive answer on whether or not Converter can handle this.

Thanks.

[pcerda · Accepted solution]

Hi chester78,

You are correct, you cannot migrate a VM without delete the existing snapshots.

The alternative that you are thinking about, to use vCenter Converter to migrate the VMs, it's a good choice to avoid delete the snapshots and all the time this action takes. The vCenter Converter will migrate the Virtual Machines in the current state.

About the snapshots, i recommend you read this KB of VMware about the best practices for virtual machines snapshots:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102527...

Regards / Saludos

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[AndreTheGiant]

Snapshots on ESX/ESXi are a bad idea...

Use when you need, but delete as soon as possible.

You have performance and storage filling issues with active snapshots.

Use backup instead of snapshots.

Or use storage snapshots (if your storage can provide them).

Andre

[chester78]

Thanks to both of you.