A vSphere cross-vCenter migration allows you to move virtual machines (VMs) between two different vCenter Server instances. This comes in handy for data center consolidations, hardware refreshes, or general workload balancing. It’s a native vCenter feature that you can use if the vCenters are in the same SSO domain or if they are independent vCenters.
For historic understanding and discussion, this cross vCenter migration capability was not baked into earlier versions of vCenter. Instead, it was available as a VMware Fling. Flings were the primary vehicle for rapid innovation, acting as a sandbox for features that eventually became foundational to vSphere. A lot of the Flings were rolled into final product releases, but in advance of that they were available to customers for download and for use “at your own risk”. Another example would be VMware PowerCLI. In my opinion, Flings came from a point in time when using VMware was exciting and the people who worked for VMware were excited and super innovative. This showed in their products and we benefited from their work, as a result. It’s a larger discussion, and maybe one for a future post, but it’ll be interesting to see if Broadcom looks and feels the same as their ongoing changes to the vSphere platform continue to evolve. What do you think?
In any case, as it relates to this write up, we will be working with 2 vCenter’s in 2 different SSO domains. We’ll be leveraging the Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion (XVM) method.
There are a few prerequisites to consider.
- Both the source and destination environments must have vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing (min).
- You’ll need network connectivity between the 2 vCenter’s. TCP 443, 902, and 8000.
- All vCenter’s should have valid NTP configurations with no or limited clock skew.
- Ideally, vCenter’s should be with the same major release or up or down 1 version, example Source at v7.0 and and target at 8.0.
- Consider EVC baselines and CPU generation compatibility.
To get things moving along, you’ll need to do the following:
- Connect to the Source vCenter and right-click the VM, select Migrate, then select Cross vCenter Server export. I would almost always recommend selecting to ‘Keep VMs on the source vCenter‘. This provides a safety net if the migration fails or if you need to roll back to the original host immediately.
- Provide the FQDN/IP of the target vCenter and administrative credentials. Accept the SSL certificate thumbprint, if prompted.
- Select the target Compute Resource, Storage, Folder, and map Networking, selecting Next at each step to move the wizard along.
- The system will run pre-checks. If any fail, you must resolve them before proceeding.
- Execute the migration and monitor progress in the Tasks pane
After the migration wraps up, review the following
- Confirm that the VM is in the Inventory on the target vCenter and that the VM is running.
- If you moved the VM from another network, you’ll need to tend to its IP configuration and adjust as necessary so that it will function on the target network.
- Confirm that the VM is reachable by IP (ping) and its name (validate DNS).
- Confirm VMware Tools is running on the target version.
- Adjust backups or validate that the backup application will backup the VM.
In summary, not overly exciting but useful when you need it.