Instant recovery & quick migration - VM shutdown delay or scheduling?

[TonioRoffo]

Hello,

I'd like to leverage instant recovery and quick migration to move vsphere VM's to hyper-v.

The nature of quick migration is such that you can't really predict when the first copy will be done & when the source VM will shut down.
Is there any way to delay or schedule when the VM will go down for the final sync?

Between vsphere machine I leverage replication to do this, but it's not possible between different hypervisor vendors.

Thank you

[david.domask]

Hi Yves,

Right now there isn't a way to schedule the pause/suspend, but can you clarify the use case a bit more? You're concerned about the state of the machine on the original HyperV host or the instant recovered machine?

Is vMotion not preferred in this case for a specific reason?

[TonioRoffo]

I'm involved in a lot of migrations from ESXi (without vcenter) to stand-alone hyper-v machines.

I'm looking for a way to move the machines and keep the MoRef ID so I don't have to start new backup chains/have "double" the offload to immutable S3 storage.

Thanks.

[david.domask]

Got it, thank you for the clarification. However, I'm afraid I need to tell that there won't be a way to continue the VMware backup chains with the restored VMs on HyperV -- I understand what you're trying to avoid, but regrettably it will be a new chain here and there just won't be a way to avoid this.

For the original scenario, I think I understand your goal now, which is you want to know when to shut down the original production VM after the Instant Recovery to HyperV is completed, and unfortunately, there is not a good answer for this either. You could write a script monitoring the status of the instant recovery and then use PowerCLI to power off the original machine, but this might be more effort than it's worth.

As is such, I think the best approach here is to do it in batches and schedule maintenance windows for these machines, and power off the machines as they recover. Unfortunately, as noted, you will not be able to avoid the new backup chain at this time.