Migrate vCAC Managed VMs from vCenter 5.5 (Windows install) to vCenter 6 (VCSA)

[flynmooney]

We're looking at moving to vSphere 6 appliances from vSphere 5.5 Windows installs.  We currently have machines built and managed by vCAC 6.2.  We've done infrastructure upgrades in the past by creating a new environment, disconnecting ESXi server from one vCenter and reconnecting to the new vCenter.  The problem now would be with vCAC managing the machines in what order do we do this?  Do we add the new vCenter as a new endpoint in vCAC with a new URL first and then migrate the VMs and will the inventory process recognize this?  Or do we take a small outage while we migrate to the new vCenter and then connect the new vCenter with the same URL as the old one as an endpoint to vCAC?

[sbeaver]

Do we add the new vCenter as a new endpoint in vCAC with a new URL first?  Yes this needs to be your first step so they new vCenter can be inventoried. In my environment we have added quite a few vCenter appliances and have been migrating away from the windows version just like you are doing and what I have seen is vCAC is able to know that things have moved and have updated the inventory automatically.  I am not sure how many managed machines got migrated but from an administrative view I saw compute resources and reservations get updated automatically.

[flynmooney]

To completely make this work in my lab environment I had to change the reservations of the machines to get them to be fully managed by vCAC.  Did you have to do this?  Did you create anything in vCO to automate this process as it's a single VM at a time through the GUI and 1000 VMs wouldn't be very efficient.

[sbeaver]

To completely make this work in my lab environment I had to change the reservations of the machines to get them to be fully managed by vCAC -  Just curious, once you made the move did you re-run the inventory tasks?  I am not sure if any of the managed machines were moved but can confirm that vCAC undated itself once the inventory was run

There are some workflows on mass moving virtual machines from one vCenter to another.  Take a look at in the vCenter folder of the library, I think it is tthere

[flynmooney]

I did rerun inventory tasks on both vCenters.  Everything worked just perfectly with the VMs being transferred and vCAC picking them up in the new vCenter.  Where I ran into a problem was when I tried to run any actions on the VMs.  The VMs were still part of the old reservation which pointed to the old vCenter.  When I ran a resource action it was trying to contact the VM in the old vCenter.  When I changed the VM to the new reservation which was pointed to the new vCenter the resource actions worked as expected.

For reference I am using vRA Automation 6.2.1

[sbeaver]

That really actually makes sense.  So to automated this you could for loop an action to change reservations once complete

[flynmooney]

Here's my take on a workflow to change a single VM reservation. 

Inputs:

• vCAC:VCACHost (vcacHost)
• vCAC:Reservation (reservationName)
• vCAC:VirtualMachine (vcacVM)

var entity = reservationName.getEntity();

var hostReservationID = entity.getProperty("HostReservationID");

System.log("HostReservationID: " + hostReservationID);

var vmEntity = System.getModule("com.vmware.library.vcac").getVirtualMachineEntity(vcacHost,vcacVM);

var properties = new Properties();

var name = new Array();

var value = new Array();

name[0] = "HostReservationID";

value[0] = hostReservationID;

if (name != null) {

    for (var i = 0; i < name.length; i++) {

        properties.put(name[i], value[i]);

        System.log(name[i] + " : " + value[i]);

    }

}

var links = null;

System.getModule("com.vmware.library.vcac").updateEntity(vmEntity,properties,links);

[AcuteSys]

Can either of you post up all the steps required to accomplish this?

I am also in the midst of migrating VMs from an old vCenter endpoint to another vCenter endpoint and not sure of the steps required to get vRA to manage the machine again. Right now I have both vCenter endpoints setup in vRA. our vsphere team migrated the VM into the new vCenter but in vra its showing as Missing.