Migrating vCenter to new subnet and domain with dvSwitch

[Timothy1]

Hi,

Currently we are using vSphere 4.1u1. We do have dvSwitch for all of our production machine. We now need to migrate the vCenter to a new domain / IP. My idea was to use the datamigration tool that was provided for migrating between 4.0 to 4.1. However the wizard states that it is not supported.

So now I am stuck. I know if I change the ip/subnet/domain my host will get the disconnected state. I was thinking about following this article http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=585044... (creating a new machine and migrating). However it is does not state how to backup certif keys (probably because they become invalid). More interesting is that the ESX host might become disconnected. I could change the vpx.cfg  but I wonder if the ESX host will recognize vcenter as a new vCenter and that they might be get network distortions.

Any thoughts on this?

(My backup plan is to migrate everything to standard switches, however we use pvlans so ...)

[Timothy1]

For those interested, I played it saved and migrated everything to standard switches.

I migrated the PVLAN to the master vlan. The downside is that the nodes can see eachothers (because they are in the main vlan), the upside is that everything kept on working

Then I copied c:\users\all users\vmware\Virtual Center\ (*) to the same directory on the new vCenter machine, configured the odbc connections and reinstalled using the existing database. All settings were kept (except the active directory logins ofcourse). After that I moved back to the dvSwitch which was recognised by the ESX hosts. I'm fairly sure that if I wouldn't have moved it would have worked as well because the dvSwitch was still "connected" to the ESX hosts via the correct uplinks

(*) If you don't do this, the installer will create new certificates. The impact is that you will have to manually reconnect the ESX hosts.