Need help brainstoring for large WAN VMWare Migration

I'm looking for some input and ideas.

I have a company that is moving from one state to another. West Coast to Central US. They have a VMWare Infrastructure of about 100 machines. Spread over VMWare 4.5 and 5.0. They are also using multiple SAN's. HP, Compellent and Equalogic.

We are trying to figure out the best way to move all the VM's w/the least amount of headache. The problem is that nothing is the same and there is no consistency. We've spun up a 5.1 Blade Server in the new locations.

What are your thought and ideas. Please give as much detail as possible. I've managed VMWare before but I've never done this time of move with VM's.

The WAN connection right now is only 10Mbps and we are looking at bumping it up to 1000Mbps.

Thanks..

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iBrokeIT

VMware is the proper capitalization for the company, not "VMWare".

We have used Zerto in the past when we were in a similar situation and needed to decommission a site and move the VMs to a new physical site. We just just picked the 25 VM license package and moved them in batches of 25 with great success.

dave330i

10 Mbps ~ 4GB/hr assuming most of the WAN bandwidth is dedicated for replication. Assuming 50GB/VM, it'll take ~52 days to replicate all the VMs. This doesn't account for the VM data change rate.

If the RPO/RTO is generous (>24 hours), then a backup solution that can deduplicate might be worth looking into. If they can't handle such a long outage, then look into SRM. SRM supports array-based and vSphere replication.

joelsfood

Veeam replication with a backup proxy (or two) on each site has worked well moving stuff between our datacenters. Whatever software solution you use, you're definitely going to want to upgrade that pipe if you want to get this done in any reasonable amount of time.

jibbajabba

vSphere 4.5 - that must be a magic version migrating all by itself

Lexluethar

We have Compellent as well, I don't know the time frame you are requiring.

If you have two Compellent SANs the easiest solution would be to use live volume to migrate from one location to another. I'm not sure of the bandwidth requirement for live volume (quick google search i couldn't find it). If you did a live volume on both Compellents you could seamlessly move from one location to the other. We moved 400 VMs from one data center to another at my company without any down time. We have live volume though and Compellent at both sites.

If you don't have enough bandwidth for a live migration you could do the next best thing which would be to migrate the data from one site to the other - once 100% replicated turn off the VM and remove the vmx file from inventory, then enable the storage in the other location and add the vmx file back into inventory. This would cause an outage though.

Alternatively if you have something like Veeam or CommVault you can bring up the replicated / backup copy in the other data center.

pcgizzmo

Thanks for the replys. We are looking at SRM, Veeam and I will look at Zerto as well. We will be upgrading the pipe. I believe we are trying to get a 1 Gig connection. This is easily one of the most complicated things I've done so I want to be very careful on how we approach it. I do believe some of the servers we can just shut down and copy over but others will most likely need to be live.

Lexluethar

Well it won't be a simple copy. Realize unless you are on 5.5 you do not have the ability to run an Enhanced vMotion which would allow you to change the datastore and the host. Since you don't have that ability the VMs would need to be turned off during the migration, which could take hours or days depending on the size of the server.

This is why doing the transfer at the SAN level is your best option that would mitigate down time. Alternatively you can use another program like Veeam to move the servers.

What do you use for backup? CommVault has the ability to backup a VM to another location and bring the VM back into vCenter from that other data center.

dave330i

Lexluethar wrote: »

Since you don't have that ability the VMs would need to be turned off during the migration, which could take hours or days depending on the size of the server.

No. If you use replication technology (SRM, Veeam, Zerto, etc), the VM down time is minimal.

pcgizzmo

We are looking at AppAssure for a backup solution right now to replace an old Symantec backup system.

Lexluethar wrote: »

We have Compellent as well, I don't know the time frame you are requiring.

If you have two Compellent SANs the easiest solution would be to use live volume to migrate from one location to another. I'm not sure of the bandwidth requirement for live volume (quick google search i couldn't find it). If you did a live volume on both Compellents you could seamlessly move from one location to the other. We moved 400 VMs from one data center to another at my company without any down time. We have live volume though and Compellent at both sites.

If you don't have enough bandwidth for a live migration you could do the next best thing which would be to migrate the data from one site to the other - once 100% replicated turn off the VM and remove the vmx file from inventory, then enable the storage in the other location and add the vmx file back into inventory. This would cause an outage though.

Alternatively if you have something like Veeam or CommVault you can bring up the replicated / backup copy in the other data center.

Lexluethar

Dave you are correct using another technology on top of VMware, my reference was not being able to do it in VMware without either storage layer assistance or another tool like Veeam or Zerto.

DPG

Another vote for Veeam. Use some local servers or portable NAS as a replica target and then ship them to the new site. Use a VPN to do a final replication before spinning up at the new site.