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spankiej
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Move VMs

I have 4 older servers that have ESXi 4.0 installed on them with the free license for testing. All the VMs are installed on the local hard drives. My company decided to turn this test environment into a production environment before I got the proper hardware. I now have my production environment with servers attached to a SAN and Enterprise Plus licensing. They are running ESXi 4.1. What is the best way to move my VMs from the old test environment to the new one?

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weinstein5
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Welcoem to the Forums - I would look at FastSCP and copy the directories holding the VMs to the new environment and then add the VM to the inventory -

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weinstein5
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Welcoem to the Forums - I would look at FastSCP and copy the directories holding the VMs to the new environment and then add the VM to the inventory -

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Xeonel
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If you still have the trial license active on the old ESXi servers, you could try to use SVmotion and then Vmotion to do this without downtime. You just need to add the old hosts to your new cluster and export the SAN luns to them as well.

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weinstein5
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but the free license is not enabled for vmotion, svmotion or vcenter client licxenses -

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spankiej
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Thanks guys. I just did the copy with FastSCP on a test VM and it worked great.

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Xeonel
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That's odd. I've got a test environment with two ESX 4.0 and one vCenter 4.0 where I can use all functionality (vMotion, SVmotion etc.).

If that indeed does not work, I'd just put one production host in maintenance and use it's license on the old ones to facilitate the migration. Like I said, if you need to avoid downtime during migration this would make your life easier.

Forgot to mention, the test environment is using evaluation licenses.

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spankiej
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It would be nice to avoid downtime but my test servers don't have HBAs in them to connect to the SAN so I'd have downtime just to install the HBAs.

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Xeonel
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You could still pull it off by using intermediate NFS datastores on both environments. It all depends on how important it is for you to keep them up.

Andrei.

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weinstein5
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Since you have vCenter I assume you are running under the evaluation mode which equal to Enterprise Plus and a 60 day limit but when the OP said he was using the Free license I assumed he was running his ESXi hosts with the Free Hypervisor which cuts back on the licensed features but does not have a time limit -

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Kasraeian
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If your trial period finished and you entered the licenses for free usage, you can't use vmotion and svmotion as free license didn't have that feature but if you have entered your licenses at the beginning of your usage, you can try to put them back into trial period again, join them to your production and use svmotion for vms. (in the trial period you will have all features)

There is one another way I'm thinking which is depend on your production environment state right now and the workload of your servers (with enterprise plus license).

May be you can move all VMs from one of your hosts (with license) and disconnect it from your vCenter, in this case you would have one license for use Smiley Wink ,use it for connecting you old servers, move their vms (one host in time) and finally add that server back and use it.


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