Best route to migrate VMs

[jamesbowling]

I wanted to gather some insight on ideas for moving VMs from a 3.5 environment which has an EMC AX150 as the SAN to a new environment which consists of new 4.1 hosts and an IBM DS3512 SAN.  The AX150 is not supported on 4.1 and so they are needing to move to the new SAN and new hosts.  What would be some methods that might be best in this situation?  I was thinking maybe using something like Veeam to move or copy the VMs that are on the old hosts to the new, upgrading the virtual hardware/tools and then powering them on in the new environment.  Once verified removing them from the old.  Also, a couple of the VMs have RDMs attached that they want to convert to standard VMDKs.

Any thoughts on other methods that might be best?

[jamesbowling]

Maybe use vCenter Converter for the VMs with RDMs?

[BorisBorshevsky]

Have you tried Storage Vmotion?

Storge Vmotion also can change RDMs into vmdk files

[DSTAVERT]

Converter is a nice tool if you don't have storage vMotion. It has the ability to clone and shut down the source and power up the destination. The last part of the process just prior to shutting down the source is to shut down source services, quiesce and then copy the last minute changes to the destination.

[DSTAVERT]

Another thing I forgot is that you can configure multiple concurrent tasks. You can set it one or more. If you set it to one you can set up several conversions and it will take them one at a time. As one completes it will start the next. If you have many similar conversions your can right click on a task and Copy as New. Make any changes and then add to the queue.

[jamesbowling]

Storage vMotion was thought of but I have to migrate some VMs first in order to free up some space on the old SAN or present LUNs to the 3.5 hosts from the new SAN.

[BorisBorshevsky]

We had the same issue in our company only with "old hardware" ESX4 hosts and new ones,

We exposed both SANs to all the hosts and moved the VMs via Storage Vmotion, no downtime.

Only downtime was moving VMs to the new Hosts because of Processor differences

[conyards]

The attached diagram documents how this was achieved in my current infrastructure.

This obviously would rely on you using Storage VMotion over standard VMotion, and encompasses the suggestions made above.

Simon