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brunoguerrasous
Contributor
Contributor
‎01-04-2017 05:32 AM

Migration from environment 5.5 to 6.0 (500 vms)

Hello Everyone,

I have a 5.5 installation with 500 virtual machines, using vDS with 2 LACPs, across 8 hosts.

I want to install a fresh 6.0 environment. So I installed ESXi 6.0 in one host, and vCenter 6.0 in this host.

I need to migrate all VMs from the old vCenter to the new one, with no downtime. And upgrade VMware tools and hardware another time with only one stop. Maximium 2 days. (weekend)

My possibility is:

      - Remove 5.5 hosts from the old vCenter, add to the new one, and vMotion the VMs to the 6.0 host. But I would need to change vDS to VSS before doing this, right? I have 500 vms, that would so much work to do, and I don´t have network adapters available to do this. All datastores are accessible on both vCenters.

    

If you have other ideas, I'm open for every suggestion.

Regards

Bruno

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership
‎01-04-2017 05:54 AM

Welcome to the Community,

I had to reinstall several vCenter Server instances lately due to a issue which destroyed the "old" vCenter Servers.

What I did was to setup vCenter Server (in my case v5.5, but this shouldn't matter), configure it, and create the vDS (make sure you select the correct version!!!) to have the port groups available for the hosts, which needed to be added. The Add Host wizard asked to match the existing port groups to the new ones, which made the migration smooth.

Prior to adding the hosts to the new vCenter Server, I'd recommend you disable HA, and set DRS to "Manual" to avoid side effects.

I ran into issues with one of the hosts, for which someone - not sure who and why - tried to activate "Maintenance Mode", so make sure this is not the case. Otherwise the port group mapping will not work.

You may want to test this with one of the hosts (with a few VMs) to see whether this works for you too.

André

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