Copying 4.1 vm to 5.5 cluster

[willc2004]

Hello,

I've been powering off vm's in our old 4.1 cluster and copying them down to my pc and uploading then to the new 5.5 cluster / datastore.  I register them  - fire them up - upgrade tools then hardware without any issue.

I now have come across a vm on the old system with multiple disk.  One of those disks are located on different volume making it look like I have 2 of the same vm folder that I normally copy over to the new cluster.  What is the best way to move this vm over?  I believe the disk on the other volume is just an archive drive for the exchange store.

4.1 cluster and 5.5 cluster do not talk to each other.  I would like to keep that way.

Thanks.

[virtualDD]

Hi,

It seems to me like you're doing a lot of manual work for this migration. I can see that having multiple disks on different datastores might require some more manual work like vmkfstools to rename a vmdk if they have the same name (I have seen this happening when vmdks are spread across datastores).

My approach would be to use VMware converter. You can install it on your workstation and then migrate the VMs directly from vCenter to vCenter without actually saving the vm on your local computer first. And in the process you can change a few settings like vmx-version or change the provisioning type of your vmdks.

Link: https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/info/slug/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vcenter_con...

[Nick_Andreev]

Alternatively, storage vMotion can rename disks. So what you can do is, put the second disk on another datastore or same datastore but different folder and then svMotion the VM. This will rename disks accordingly as part of the process.

[Pyrochaser]

If you have additional datastores you can storage vMotion and set all the drives to vMotion to the same Datastore through the advanced properties.

vMotioning the machine to another datastore should push all drives to that datastore.

Step 1: Highlight the VM, Right Click and select Migrate.

Step 2: Point the VM to a specific datastore and all drives should follow it.

In the event that does not work you can use advanced vMotion to push each drive to the same datastore, once there you can copy the VM from the datastore.

Step 1: Highlight the VM, Right Click and Migrate

Step 2:  Select Change Datastore

Step 3: Click the Advance Button

Step 4: Click the Hyper links for each drive and change the current location to a different datastore, however be sure to place them all on the same datastore.

[willc2004]

Thank you all for replying.

I really just want to manually copy the folders over to the new system.  This is my last server to move and the previous 6 servers work perfect this way.  Can I copy both folders over to the new store - keeping one folder that's named the same in a subfolder?   Add the main VM to the new system but before starting it up add the additional disk from the subfolder keeping them in the same order.

Thanks again.

[Nick_Andreev · Accepted solution]

Absolutely, you can do that.