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esxiator
Contributor
Contributor

Moving VMs from old vmware cluster 5.0 to a new one 5.5U2

Hello All,

I have to move about hundred VMs from old cluster vmware 5.0 with vcenter 5.0 to a new cluster vmware 5.5 that will have vcenter 5.5 (the appliance).

the new cluster will resides in the same datacenter, on the same LAN and it will see the same datastore of the old. Scope is dismiss old cluster hosts.

which are good ways to do it ?

can the vcenter 5.5 view/manage old hosts and make a vmotion of VMs from old cluster to the new cluster ?

is it possible to do a vmotion between the cluster ? and how to ?

any suggestions to addressing to the solutions is accepted.

thank you in advance

regards

GB

9 Replies
crawfordm
Expert
Expert

Sounds like you have 2 options -

1.  Use VMware Converter to convert the vm's from old cluster to New cluster.

2. Remove hosts from old vCenter and connect them to New vCenter and then you can vMotion the vm's to the New cluster

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its_arun
Contributor
Contributor

>>can the vcenter 5.5 view/manage old hosts and make a vmotion of VMs from old cluster to the new cluster ?

Yes vcenter 5.5 can view and manage old host (refer supported matrix) assuming your hosts are 5.0.x it should be supported.

>> is it possible to do a vmotion between the cluster ? and how to ?

This thread should be of some help vMotion between 4.1 cluster and 5.5 cluster

Please mark it as helpful or correct answers if this address the issue.

esxiator
Contributor
Contributor

Hi crowfordm, thank you very much for your reply.

I want to avoid vmware converter usage, first I nedd to re-install the agent on the VMs, plu reboot.

My idea is to use a vMotion, keeping VM on. the new

VMware cluster with 5.5U2 software version on hosts and on vCenter.

I have difficult to think that vmware has not produced any best practices about this.

how many customers move to a new version of vmware in the same datacenter due to i.e. an hardware refresh ?

this procedure should be very simple from my point of view after adoption of this vmware software.

How to view all VMs managed by old vCenter 5.0 from a new vCenter 5.5 and make vMotion of them ?

SAN storage is common to both versions.

thank you

regards

GB

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raog
Expert
Expert

Once you add the 5.0 hosts to the cluster, select all VMs on the 5.0 hosts and then choose to migrate them to the 5.5 Hosts. If a VMotion is not possible, then a cold migration would be the way to go.

Regards

Girish

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vThinkBeyondVM
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

You can follow these steps:

- Say your old Center has some hosts i.e. ESXi hosts.   First you need to vacate some old hosts so that you can install latest ESXi 5.5u2 on free hosts.

- To vacate old ESXi, you will have to migrate all your VMs on some old hosts first and make some hosts free.

- Install new brand vCenter with new DB : If you care about historical/performance data then you can connect new vCenter with old DB.

- Remove all free hosts from old vCenter & Install latest ESXi 5.5 on free old hosts. Storage is already shared across all ESXi host (as per your last comment)

- Add new ESXi host into new vCenter

- Add old ESXi to new vCenter.

- Configure vMotion network and migrate all your VMs to new ESXi from old ESXi host.

- Remove old ESXi host from new vCenter and fresh install latest ESXi 5.5

- Add latest ESXi hosts (which you installed in above step) again back to new vCenter.


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dhanarajramesh

if you want to do cold migration,simple way is that 1) make old cluster data-stores visible to new data store by reconfiguring Zoning at storage level and mounting existing VMFS to new cluster. 2) get the downtime and shutdown running VM in old cluster and remove from inventory 3) browse the same data store in new cluster and add it to inventory and power on 4) even you can do storage migration to new cluster dedicated data store.

esxiator
Contributor
Contributor

hello raog,

I never did it before,

when I will add hosts to the vCenter 5.5 of the new cluster, what happen to the vCenter 5.0 of the old cluster ?

esxi hosts will be visible form both vCenters (5.0 and 5.5) ? and there I can make vMotion ?

thanks in advance

Regards

GB

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vThinkBeyondVM
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Let me clear your confusion.

1. If you have HA enabled on old 5.0 host, you can disable HA first. Take your esxi host out from old cluster.

2. Once you remove your host from old 5.0 cluster. There will not be any references with your esxi hosts those removed.  You can delete the cluster if No more in use.

3. Once you make ready new 5.5u2 vCenter, you will have to create new cluster with exactly same configuration.

4. You will be doing vMotion only across hosts in same vCenter or new cluster. vMotion across two different vCenters is not supported at the moment.

From here on you can follow the steps that I have already specified. Let me know if you have any doubt.


----------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks & Regards
Vikas, VCP70, MCTS on AD, SCJP6.0, VCF, vSphere with Tanzu specialist.
https://vThinkBeyondVM.com/about
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed here are strictly my own. I am solely responsible for all content published here. Content published here is not read, reviewed or approved in advance by VMware and does not necessarily represent or reflect the views or opinions of VMware.

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HawkieMan
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I did the migration work from 5.0-5.1 and finally to 5.5 for over 4000 VMs, and after having some issues we did it this way:

1. Set up a new vcenter with new version

2. Created new dvswitch on the new vcenter with the same setup as on the old one (remember dvswitches are owned by the vcenter).

3. Disconnected the esx hosts 1 by one and imported them with running vms to the new vcenter

4. The VMs now had "invalid backing" on the config section for the VMs, and we now changed to the corresponding vlan in the new dvswitch (making sure we only took 1 leg of the esx trunk and added the New dvswitch to that one while the second leg maintained traffic for the "missing" dvswitch)

5. We now upgraded vmware tools and migrated the vms into an esx host with the right version esx

6. After clearing out the esx we reinstalled it with new version and brought it back into production

7. Then we continued with the next host

All this occured without stopping production

The reason we did it this way was to make sure we maintaned production stable. We could have just imported all esx hosts directly into the vcenter, but in such case you will need to make sure you have a dvswitch version compatible with previous version of esx, and for us that defeated some of the purpose of the migration.

You also need to be alert to vms having to old versions of the virtual hardware to be supported. Those will need a hw upgrade first.

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