Moving From vCenter Server to vCenter Appliance

  • 24 September 2016
  • 3 replies
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I have a 3-node cluster for VDI running ESXi on all three nodes. At the moment vCenter (v6.0) is running on a single virtual machine (this virtual server is on a physically separate cluster from the VDI/Nutanix one). I'm starting to look into how to go about moving from that vCenter server to the VMware vCenter appliance.

What considerations would need to be made to get the 3-node Nutanix cluster to move from a Windows-based vCenter server to the vCenter appliance? Would there be downtime involved?

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Userlevel 6
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I've moved your post from the CE forums to the commercial product forums since we're talking VMW.

Yea, you can do this without downtime, but it will take some doing depending on how you have things set up.

Also, note you will lose all of the vCenter specific stuff, like permissions, events, tasks, history, alerting, organization, and so on.

If you're OK with that, the first task is to figure out how your network is set up.

Are you running distributed switches? If so, thats a whole different ball of wax vs if you were doing all standard VSS switches in VMW
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This is a very straightforward vCenter installation -- very little post-install configuration. No distributed switches - just two standard vSwitches (and one of them is the Nutanix switch). Historical performance, events, and alerting would be fine to lose.
Userlevel 6
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Hey, sorry I missed this reply, been heads down on some large work.

Short answer here is that you can just go to the new appliance and "add hosts" to a new cluster that you create. Literally you point the add hosts wizard at the old FQDN, and it will "pull" the systems into the appliance, and you'll see them "drop" from the old appliance.

I've done this about a ~dozen or so times before, works like a charm.