How to move VM's to a new storage AND new hosts

[lyngsie]

Hi,

I'm having a hard time figuring out, how I am going to move all VM's from an NFS storage to a new iscsi storage (HP SAN). We are also introducing new hardware for the hosts, so all in all this will be a whole new vCenter environment (also going from vSphere 4.1 to 5.5). My first thought was to attach the new storage to the old hosts. Then do a storage migration one by one over a certain time (powered off machines), remove the VM from the old vCenter, and then add them to the new vCenter environment. But we have exhausted all the NICs on the old hosts, so I cannot attach the new storage, and I cannot share a vmkernel port for both iscsi and nfs.

Do you have any suggestions how I can approach this?

[weinstein5]

Since it sounds like you are setting up a completely new environment = I would set up the new 5.5 environment and use VMware Standalone Converter to V2V the VMs to the new environment -

[lyngsie]

I never considered using external tools like the converter. As I see it, I would still have to approach the problem of not being connected to both storages, unless you think I should introduce a third (perhaps local) storage as an intermediate location? This has to be done for 130 VMs so I do find the proposed solution to be tedious. I might be wrong. I will have to look into what the VMware Standalone Converter offers.

[prasadsv]

Here is what you can do: (this solution works only if you can do VMotion between old and new set of servers)

- Configure iSCSI(assuming you are configuring SWiSCSI) on new set of servers.Make sure you create you vSwitch for this.

- Configure VMotion  on new set of servers and check if configuration is fine.

-  Do Enhanced vMotion of VM's from old set of servers(where source datastore is NFS datastore in your case) to new set of servers(select the destination hosts from new set of servers pool and destination datastore as iSCSI datastore)

- Then remove new set of servers from VC after done with migrating all VM's to iSCSI datastore and add them to your new vCenter server.

If you cannot perform Enhanved vMotion on your setup:

- Configure NFS(as on old set of servers) on new set of servers.

- Configure vMotion on new set of servers and make sure there is no configuration issue.

- Migrate all your VM's to new set of servers.

- Then do a storage vmotion tose VM's to iSCSI datastore.

- Remove new set of hosts from VC and add them back to new vCenter server.

[weinstein5]

Using Converter you do not need to have both environments connected to the same storage - it will move the workloads across the network - it can be tedious but because the migrations can be done while the source workload is live you can run it throughout the day

[lyngsie]

I will consider an alternative to your suggestion. As I have "enough" NICs on the new hosts, I thought I would attach the old NFS storage to a free vmnic (later used for Multiple-NIC vMotion) on the new hosts. Then shutdown the VM, unregister it from old VC, register it in new VC. Then do a storage migration from old storage to the new storage. Couldn't that work?

[lyngsie]

Your suggestion also seem plausible. As I do not have experience using the Converter, I will have to read up on it before deciding. Thanks for enlightening me

[prasadsv · Accepted solution]

It would work if you are fine with having downtime for your VM's.

If you cannot afford downtime,you can try install same set of ESX(i) version on few new set of servers( say 10 out of 50 new servers) and add them to Old VC and proceed with below steps

- Configure old NFS storage on new set of servers

- Migrate(vMotion) all the VM's on old NFS  to new set of servers

- Remove all the new set of servers from VC

- Add same set of new servers(to which VM's were migrated) to new VC

-Migrate all the VM's to new storage and then upgrade your new set of servers

I feel this way you can avoid having a downtime for your VM's.