Hey all. I’m in the midst of testing “Moving” vm’s from ESXi to Nutanix AHV. One of these is testing the move of a vCenter Appliance to an AHV cluster. So far the VCSA does not come up cleanly, seems it loses it’s connection to storage/boot device. I’ve been trying multiple variations of the Move settings, in particular: Bypass Guest Operations on Source VM’s, Retain MAC Address and Skip CDROM Addition
Has anyone successfully completed a Move of a VCSA? Any hints/tips? This may be needed as we vacate ESXi clusters.
"Move" a vCenter VCSA to a Nutanix AHV Cluster - how?
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Userlevel 2
+3
Never tried to migrate a VCSA… Don’t think it is supported by VMware to run that on AHV…
Normally I leave the VCSA on ESXi until the last move of virtual machines. Then we are able to remove the VCSA completely.
I concur, it’s not desired nor (crossing fingers) a planned Production task to Move a VCSA to AHV. But we’re contemplating a lot of things with the future of ESXi and this was a thought to test, for in case. After all my failed tests, just thought I’d throw it out here and see if anyone found a successful path.
Userlevel 6
+8
Put vcenter on a temporary esx node and then upgrade your environment to ahv. When done you can delete vcenter and the temporary esx node.
Vcenter on ahv is not supported
Put vcenter on a temporary esx node and then upgrade your environment to ahv. When done you can delete vcenter and the temporary esx node.
Vcenter on ahv is not supported
Kinda not our use case. But I get what you’re saying. We have 2 environs all traditional ESXi right now, NOT Nutanix ESXi. Both environs may go thru transition to Nutanix using AHV. So it’s the shell-game of the migration path from standalone ESXi to Nutanix AHV that I’m testing.
And yes, VCSA on Nutanix will surely poke holes in support - from either vendor. But I’m testing to see if feasible from a migration path, hence my ask here. To see if anyone has gotten it to work.
Userlevel 6
+8
I would leave it on the esxi node and migrate all other vm’s to nutanix with nutanix move. When you have empty esxi node with only vcenter on it. Shut them down and only your new cluster. ;)
Agreed, if that works out. The challenge is locality. Depending on the end migration path, the last vestige of ESXi could be on a host/cluster we shouldn't have VCSA running due to internal legal/logical issues. I can’t quite give all the details online...
Another option is to migrate the VCSA to AWS, if that’s a thing. Haven’t looked at that yet. I’d like to keep on-prem.
My thinking now, should the AHV Move not be achievable (which seems unlikely at this point), and AWS not desirable, that yes, I’ll just leave a 1-2 node ESXi cluster up and running for those last VCSA’s until EOL.
I had hopes that someone was able to pull off a VCSA Move from ESXi to AHV.
Userlevel 6
+8
Well just give it a try ;) Let us know if it worked ;)
Oh I’ve tried, many variances to the Move options, to no avail, probably 8-10 attempts. I was hoping someone had that found a way, like “undo this on the VCSA” before the Move, or the like.
Userlevel 5
+6
Migrating virtual appliances in general is not good, because you need to prepare the VM and take snapshots, which is not right for vCenter and virtual appliances.
what you should do, build new vCenter and migrate and old one to new as per VMware best practice:
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