VMware vSphere migration solutions

By Victor Wu on 2020 年 02 月 15 日 • ( Leave a comment )

In the information business, hardware refreshment is very common. Most of customers are faced how to migrate the existing data into new hardware platform. In this post I will list out some virtual machines migration methodologies for reference.

Background

2 x SAN storage (around 50TB), one for Production, other for QA and DR.
3 x VM farm, i.e. Production, QA and DR.
Virtual Infrastructure: VMware vSphere 6.5 and vCenter 6.7.
Virtual machine: Microsoft Window virtual machine, Microsoft Clustering virtual machine, RedHat Linux virtual machine.
Virtual Disks: VMDK and RDM.
New and old SAN storage are different brands.
No any physical hosts connectivity of existing SAN storage.
Backup Software: Using Vertias NBU.

Hardware Refreshment

Migrate of all production data into new storage from old storage.

Business Requirement

Minimize the interruption of service.
The customers can only schedule a maintenance window (1 hour) for data migration for each application.

Below table shows the pros and cons for some different migration methodologies in this scenario.

The following migration methodologies are based on my project experience and are for your reference only. Please correct me if there are any mistakes.

Based on above, I choose the below migration methodologies in this scenario. Finally I can successfully complete this VM migration project.

For Microsoft Windows Platform VMs (VMDK) – VMware Storage vMotion

For Microsoft Clustering VMs (Both VMDK and RDM) – Zerto Replication

If the customer can provide much of service down time for migration of Microsoft Clustering VMs, you can choose the vmkfstools because it is a free tool.