Migrating Large VM's

tstrip007

I will migrating a farely large VM and do not want to bog up the network so I want to do a manual transfer of the VM. I want to do this by plugging in an external drive to the host at which the VM resides then download the VM files to the external drive. Physically take the external drive to a host at a different location and start the upload so that no data is trasferred over the network. Then just "add to inventory".

Looks like in order to this I will need to power down the hosts in order for esxi to pick up the external drive. Then add the device to the vm. Then install a vsphere client on the vm so that when I "download", it picks up the new local connected drive.

Am I over-complicating this lol?

linuxabuser

Wow.. immensely over-complicating this.

Do you not have shared storage?

tstrip007

We do. This migration would be over a wan link. I believe a stretched cluster would have to be implemented for a live migration which we dont have so a cold migration of host and data store would be the alternataive to my over-complicated migration theory.

linuxabuser

Well, apparently shared storage doesn't span between these hosts you're working with.

It would be much easier to grab the VM files off of the datastore and **** them onto an external drive using the vSphere client. Then (assumingly) drive to the other location, hop on a computer on that LAN, upload that folder to that datastore and then add it to inventory.

DigitalZeroOne

It may be somewhat easier to just Export the VM as an OVF/OVA, that will somewhat compress the VM into a nice neat package, you can just deploy the OVF/OVA when the VM arrives at its destination. The only issue, if I had to call it an issue, is that if the VM has multiple HDs, those drives will show up as 1 VMDK, instead of however many they were before, you won't lose anything, however. Snapshots are not kept either.

If you're going to copy the VM files, make sure that you remove any old snapshots, unless the hosts are identical in hardware. Someone may revert back to a snapshot that had different hardware, and then you will have a real headache.

tstrip007

yah i thought about doing ova/ovf export. No snaps or mult. hard drives. Its just down the road at a data center. Am going from intel to amd processors though. Thank you for your input linux and digital