Merging two Virtual Center servers into 1

[johnlennon]

Hello,

I need to merge 2 virtual center servers into 1. Each has its own MS SQL db with severa hosts, DRS, resource reservation, folders, datacenters, etc. that I would like to keep intact.

Is there a way to merge the two environments so that I could manage them from a single VC Server without having to redo all the customization, creating all resources, moving the VMs to the right folder and stuff? To some extent I don't care much about preserving the historic performance data, just not having to recreate the same layout.

Thanks

[bigfoot6]

Hey

Did you ever get anywhere with this? I need exactly the same, we have two Virtual centers in India that we'd like to merge. I was thinking about just copying attributes from one SQL table to another. Is that way too simple?

[logiboy123]

No you cannot merge two vCenter servers into one. You would have to migrate the hosts and settings from one environment into the other.

The only other solution I can think of is to use linked mode so that you get a single view of your two vCenter environments.

Long term I would just wait until vSphere 5 comes out later this year and use that as an excuse to migrate both environments into a newer better vSphere 5 system.

Regards,

Paul

[bigfoot6]

They are linked, I have several virtual centers linked. The reason for consolidating the two virtual centers in India was due to maintenance renewals. If I powered down both virtual centers and wrote a SQL script to copy and insert the data from one database to the other, you don't think that would work?

[logiboy123]

I was interested to see if someone had come up with a manual or scripted process for this as I have needed to do this several times myself and I found the following;

http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/cheap-disaster-recovery/

You could do a full scripted backup of one environment and then import it into another.

Cheers,

Paul

[bigfoot6]

I basically managed to achieve this with a powercli script, that exported everything contained in one VC to the other.

http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2010/01/vcenter-powercli-migration-script.html

There if you like to know more, it worked very well