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Migrating Existing VM's to VxRail
Hello's
I have seen this question asked a few times and the answers not quite clear. I'll attempt again
I have a new VxRail 3 node cluster of which I intend to maintain the Internal vCenter for future management of the VxRail cluster.
I also have an older 4 node cluster managed by another vCenter. Objective is to migrate the VM's (hopefully live) from the old hosts to the new VxRail cluster.
What are my options? I have read that I can add the older hosts to the VxRail vCenter, and add them as Standalone hosts - not part of the VxRail cluster - And once I do this, I'd be able to migrate/storage vMotion the VM's into the VxRail cluster - assuming I address EVC issues.
Is this possible? If not, what other ways exist to carry out such a migration, and again hopefully live - not powering down the VM's?
Thanks,
ALB.
DELL-Naoyuki K
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July 5th, 2018 19:00
I would say you can purchase migration service from dell emc.
albellie
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July 5th, 2018 20:00
Thanks for your quick response. Unfortunately this is not an option.
Our company has gone through many Migrations before transferring from one hardware platform to another and we've not had to pay anyone or buy additional software to do this.
If the response is that it is not technically possible to migrate using native VMware tools, I'm going to consider this as a major limitation on VxRail's part, and a shame considering the cost.
Thanks and please, more/better/technical responses that don't have me spending additional money.
ALB
DELL-Naoyuki K
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July 5th, 2018 21:00
Technically, there is no supported procedure unless you have external VC.
If you use external VC, you can migrate VM from one to the other.
But if you use internal VCSA, it is not supported to add other hosts into internal VCSA cluster.
And it is also not supported for internal VCSA to join external PSC.
So, you cannot vMotion by any supported method.
There is a nice article about vMotion between different SSO
https://www.ivobeerens.nl/2017/10/11/vmotion-two-vcenter-servers-different-sso-domains/
But this is also not supported by VMware.
albellie
3 Posts
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July 5th, 2018 23:00
Thanks again for your response.
Again, the plan is not to add external hosts to the VxRail Cluster. I'm assuming however that I can add them to the DataCenter that houses the VxRail cluster, either as standalone hosts in the VxRail Datacenter or create a separate from VxRail Cluster object in the VxRail Datacenter and place them into this new Cluster. This off course means that they will no longer be managed by the old vCenter server.
From this point, I can then carry out a vMotion without shared Storage from old hosts to VxRail cluster.
I've seen similar help topics on this subject in this forum suggesting this direction. I'm simply looking to firm up what I've read prior and seems fairly doable.
Thanks again,
ALB
boyler05
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July 6th, 2018 08:00
VMware created a really cool "fling" that allows you to do exactly what you are asking - vMotion (live) between different vCenter servers in different SSO domains. I used it to migrate about 65 TB of VMs "live" from an old vCenter to a new VxRail vCenter with excellent success. It is a free tool, NOT supported by VMware, but works great. Basically it is a nice GUI wrapper around the PowerCLI/API commands that support this cross-vCenter vMotion feature. Check it out:
https://labs.vmware.com/flings/cross-vcenter-workload-migration-utility
Bill
albertit
5 Posts
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July 6th, 2018 13:00
You can installe Veeam Backup & Replication as trial version and make the migration via replication. You have a short down time.
nvizor
1 Message
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July 8th, 2018 09:00
Hi,
I'm also in the process of migrating VMs from traditional SAN to VxRail/vSAN environment. I have found following resources to be useful.
Migrating to vSAN
https://storagehub.vmware.com/export_to_pdf/migrating-to-vsan
Migrating Workloads onto vSAN - YouTube
digger6
1 Message
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July 8th, 2018 22:00
Hello,
I had the same question when I moved to VXRAIL.
I didn't got a real answer so I figured it out myself and it is easy.
Use "Vmware Converter" take the VM offline on the old environment, and move it offline towards the new vxrail.
I know it is not a online migration but it was the only thing that worked for me.
We had a really old environment with iscsi that needed to be moved towards the VSAN.
Before moving enable EVC on the vxrail.
Regards,
Kurt