Need help on migration virtual machine from vsphere 5.5 to 6.0 vcenter

[Rajjabshaikh]

Hello Everyone,

I need some help on migration activity from vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6.0,

could it be possible from vsphere replication ? if yes can any buddy help me procedure,

Regards,

Buddy

[virtualDD]

Based on that little information you provide I can help you only a little.

I'm assuming your two vCenters are running completely independent of each other.

First approach:

- Present some sort of shared storage to hosts in both environment (nfs, FC, iSCSI)

- Storage vMotion your VM(s) onto that storage

- Shutdown your vm

- Remove from inventory

- Add to inventory in one of your hosts in the 6.x vCenter

- Storage vMotion to a datastore from your vCenter 6.x

- Remove temporary shared storage

Second approach:

- Connect a host running your vms to your new vCenter 6.x

- Shutdown VM(s)

- vMotion (both Storage and Compute) to a host and datastore in your new 6.x vCenter

- Reconnect host to old vCenter

Third approach (if you need this vMotion to be live)

- Make sure your CPUs are compatible

- There is a script for cross-sso vmotion from william lam (can't find the link atm, can help you find it if you want to go with that approach)

- Use the script to vMotion the VM across SSO

I'm sure there are even more ways to achieve this. If you provide a little more information on your use case I'm sure I can help you find the best solution to your problem.

To answer your last question: vSphere Replication can achieve this as well but it seems to me like a overkill if you currently don't use vSphere replication.

Another approach would be to use SCP from the command line of the esxi hosts to transfer your (powered off) vm to another host and then register it in the new vCenter.

[Rajjabshaikh]

Hi vitualDD,

thanks for your valuable information, i have 2 different vcenter (which are vcenter 5.5 and 6.0), i wanted to migrate vm from 5.5 to 6.0,

Please suggest with best practice,

Regards,

vBuddies

[RajeevVCP4]

V2V is also good option , or share same LUN on second vcenter server (esxi) then shut down vm and register it on second vc.

[virtualDD]

As the post above mine here suggests V2V (VMware Converter -> VMware vCenter Converter Standalone ) is also a good option.

There is no "best practice" as far as I can tell. Many roads lead to rome as the saying goes.

You need to figure out which approach you are the most comfortable with. How many VMs do you need to move?

You should plan downtime for all the VMs involved and then copy them with one of the approaches mentioned to the new vCenter server.

[Rajjabshaikh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I have added host5.5 into vcenter 6.0 with shared storage then now i am able to migrate vm from esxi5.5 to esxi6.0,

Regards,

vBuddies

[virtualDD]

did you really just mark your own answer as helpful and correct even tough it was suggested by me and RajeevVCP4 to do exactly that?

you have no idea how this community works, do you? but i'm happy your problem was solved.