Snake bites its tail

[wilf_williams]

I have my vcenter virtualized on an esx host, it is installed on the local storage of the host. I want to move it to the shared storage of the cluster so that I can shut down the host and upgrade. I can not migrate to the other host, because of the share storage issue. If I open the infrastructure client directly on the esx host I can not move the machine since I do not have the migrate features that vcenter gives.

Can anyone suggest a method of how to do this, short or re-installing the vcenter ?

Wilf

[O_o]

I suggest you copy the Virtual Machine files by hand ... Use a copy tool like fastSCP or WinSCP, after the upgrade you can copy them back again if necessary, and re-import them into the ESX inventory, either by using the VI Client or command line.

[mekoz · Accepted solution]

If the ESX host "sees" both the local and shared storage, a very crude (but fast) approach would be to un-register the VM, SSH to the service console and use the 'mv' command to move the folder containing the VMX/VMDK/etc to the correct LUN, then re-register your VM and power on.

Example (you'll have to modify it to reflect your environment):

power down / un-register VM

ssh esxhost

'su -' to root

mv /vmfs/volumes// /vmfs/volumes//

re-register VM / power on

[conyards]

Your VC is virtual! basically it si just a set of files.

You can shut down the VC server, then utilise a combination of cp for the files and vmkfstools -i {vmkfstools -i {source disk location} {target disk location} for the vmdks to copy the machine onto you're shared storage location.

When it's at the shared storage location, you can then register it on the standalone host, vmware-cmd -s {path to VMX file}.

You can then power it up from the viclient, log on to the server and tidy up the loose ends.

The fact that you are utilising copy operations means that the original location remains unchanged during this procedure, until such time that you choose to delete it.

Simon

[conyards]

I should like to point out that to avoid any possible file corruption, when moving VMDK files you should really utilise vmkfstools -i.