Copy everything or just the disks?

[Ron_Rosenkoette]

I've got a stand-alone ESX 3.5 host.

I'm migrating the VMs on it over to a ESX 4.0 farm with Virtual Center, etc.

Pretty straight foward to just copy over all the files for each VM, and then right-click on the .vmx file and "Add to Inventory". Then I power up the VM, upgrade the VMware Tools, shut it down, upgrade the hardware, power it back on again.

However, is this the best way to do it? Does the .vmx file from 3.5 have any important differences from the 4.0 .vmx files? Is there any reason to copy over all the .log files?

Should I keep doing it the way outline above? Or should I just copy over the disk files, and then create a new VM, using the existing disk? Would the second way be "cleaner"?

[athlon_crazy]

I would prefer to use converter 4.0.1 at least for the migration and it will handle everything for you except for VMware tools which you need to upgrade it manually.

vcbMC-1.0.6 Beta

vcbMC-1.0.7 Lite

[AndreTheGiant]

You can also use vCenter Server to move the files: just add the ESX 3.5 to your datacenter and use migrate.

Andre

[krowczynski]

Hi use the converter or move all files e.g. with fastscp.

MCP, VCP

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

>Pretty straight foward to just copy over all the files for each VM, and then right-click on the .vmx file and "Add to Inventory". Then I power up the VM, upgrade the VMware Tools, shut it down, upgrade the hardware, power it back on again.

You don't have to upgrade the hardware. It's optional.

>However, is this the best way to do it?

Add ESX 3.5 to vCenter and just migrate all VMs. You can even VMotion them to 4.0 hosts.

>Should I keep doing it the way outline above? Or should I just copy over the disk files, and then create a new VM, using the existing disk? Would the second way be "cleaner"?

No, no major difference in .vmx format between 3.5 and 4.0.

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MCP, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Ron_Rosenkoette]

Yeah I saw in the documentation that one could add an ESX 3.5 host to vCenter4, and then just VMotion the VMs to the new hosts, but when I tried to add it, it told me I needed to set up a Licensing Server.

I still have nightmares from the last time I dealt with a Licensing server in 3.x, so I decided to just copy the VMs over using a simple script. I'm only talking about 20 VMs... pretty straightforward... Shut them down, copy everything over with scp, and register the .vmx on the new host.

I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't see any problems down the line with that procedure. Seems to work fine so far...