Migrating VM's from Old Stand Alone 5.5 servers to vCenter 6.5

[Dthompson04]

Community Team,

  I have VM's on two stand alone mismatched ESXi 5.5 servers that need to be migrated to vCenter 6.5.  The old system has no redundancy so the VM's are divided up to fit the hardware.  Under the new system we'll have full redundancy using vCenter 6.5.

Existing Systems

1.  ESXi 5.5 server 1 has a lot of memory "128GB" and only 450GB of storage.

2.  ESXi 5.5 server 2 has only 24GB of memory and 20TB of storage.

  These servers are very old, slow and run independent to each other.

New Systems

1.  Dual ESXi 6.5 servers with plenty of resources to expand and grow.

2.  vCenter 6.5 implemented as a VM

Virtual Machines to be Migrated

  We have seven VM's to migrate from the old systems that include the following

Three Windows Domain Controllers

Two Windows Stand Alone Servers

Two IA related vAppliances

VM Migration Plan

1.  What options are available to migrate all VMs to the new servers?

2.  What pre-work needs to be completed

3.  What limitations can I expect to run into?

  I've reviewed serval posts on this subject, but most are vCenter 5.5 to 6.5 and none have to restricted resources that I have to deal with on the older systems.  I know what has to be done, but what are the "best practices" and best methods to complete the tasks?

[daphnissov]

There are a few ways you can go about doing this, but it depends on your license level, your hardware in these hosts, your external infrastructure, and other factors.

1. Shared storage migration. You present the same shared storage accessible to your "new" hosts to the "old" hosts. You then storage vMotion (svMotion) the "old" VMs onto this shared storage. Once complete, the "old" VMs are shutdown from the source and unregistered with the process reversed on the "new" host side. This requires you have appropriate licenses on the "old" hosts (which you didn't state), shared storage, and ability to connect to that shared storage from both sides.
2. Backup and restore. Using one of a variety of tools, you backup the "old" VMs from the source and restore them to the "new" side through your vCenter Server.
3. Export VMs. You export existing "old" VMs as OVF/OVA appliances from the source; store them at some location; then import them into the "new" vCenter Server side.
4. Replicate VMs. Using one of a variety of tools, you perform a replication of VMs from source to destination. Once the appropriate window has been reached after the data is replicated, you perform a final cut-over and fail over to the replicated VMs on the "new" side.

Each step has its own procedure, requirements, and caveats, so without knowing more about your infrastructure it's impossible to say which one works "best" for you.

[serveradminist2]

Fistly you configure vcenter 5.5 in one server then add esxi host which is  esxi 5.5. After that we can migrate vm from one vcenter to another.

[daphnissov]

serveradministrator​ That is not correct. Please do not suggest courses of action if you don't know.