Two vCenters and moving ESX hosts from one to the other

[theblackknight]

I have an existing vSphere enviroment where all the VMs are living on local disk. This environment is being managed by a physical vCenter Server.

I built a BRAND New environment with three hosts and each one has 4 sockets, 6 cores with 128GB in each host. I also created a new vCenter Server and made this a virtual machine. All are connected to iSCSI SAN.

I know that ESX hosts can only be managed by one vCenter server at a time. I now want to add the old esx hosts that have vms on local disk to the new environment that is connected to shared storage. When I try to add a host to the new vcenter server, I get a message saying that the host is already being managed by the old vcenter server and if I add it to the new one it will disconnect. Is that the best way to do this or should I disconnect the hosts from the old vcenter server first?

Also how am i going to move the VMs off of the local disk to the SAN. I have enterprise plus 4.1.

Thanks!

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

I would disconnect and remove the host(s) from the old environment and then add host into the new. This will allow your guests to continue to run. Once you have the hosts in the new environment you can use sVMotion (right click migrate, move datastore) to move your guests to shared storage.

[theblackknight]

Thanks Troy.

I will also need to create a new iscsi switch on the old hosts so they can communicate with the SAN in order to use sVmotion, correct?

[Troy_Clavell]

yes, all the networking must be setup properly and the shared storage needs to be presented to all the hosts.

[f10]

Hi,

If you don't have any shared datastore between the two ESX servers to do Storage VMotion the VM needs to be powered off but yes, storage vmotion would still work. However if you have a shared datastore between the two ESX hosts the powered on VM can be storage vmotioned. In my opinion you would have to configure the iSCSI san on the ESX host and then migrate the powered on VM's from local datastore to SAN.

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