Migrate from vSphere 5.0 to Nutanix running vSphere 6

Another way of migrating VMs from non-Nutanix to Nutanix cluster -

1. Add IP's of existing cluster ESXi hosts in the filesystem whitelist in Nutanix prism.
2. Mount Nutanix NFS datastore using public IP of one of the CVM on the old cluster.
3. You can then storage vMotion VMs from your existing storage to Nutanix storage. Once it is completed, you can power off the VMs and register the VMs on the Nutanix cluster and power on the VMs.

For configuring the whitelist, please refer to below mentioned document.

https://portal.nutanix.com#/page/docs/details?targetId=Web_Console_Guide-Prism_v4_7:wc_system_filesystem_whitelists_wc_t.html

Please note, you need Nutanix portal access to access the above mentioned document.

-NP

I've done it a couple ways before, including the NFS whitelist option that Donnie mentioned. In addition to using a whitelist, I've also done kind of the "reverse" where I'll present my source storage (iSCSI) to my Nutanix nodes by configuring a software iSCSI adapter/vmkernel adapter so that each node has both the source iSCSI VMFS volumes as well as the Nutanix storage presented as NFS. Then I'd power off and unregister the VM on the source vCenter, browse to that VM's .vmx file in the new vCenter to add to inventory, then do a storage vMotion from the iSCSI VMFS volume to the Nutanix storage. In that case, I had both the maintenance window to tolerate an outage on the VM (power off/deregister/register etc - in fact I left it offline during the whole storage vMotion) and the proper connectivity on the source storage to allow for this sort of migration. If your tolerance for downtime is low then you might have to do something like you mentioned where you add your old hosts to the new vCenter etc. My preference in this particular case was to keep the two environments completely separate and not cross pollinate. There's probably "less steps" to doing the NFS whitelist method but there's multiple ways you can go about it.