Migrate VMs using VEEAM

[liviu.tutuianu]

Dear all,

Infrastructure:
3 ESX Hosts (VMWARE)
2 VMs (located on ESX 1) (around 400 GB each)
1 Gb LAN Network connection

One of our customers has the infrastructure from above. They have 2 VMs located right now on ESX 1. This ESX host is very old and needs to be replaced by ESX 3. After that, we will create replication jobs between ESX2 and ESx3 for those two VMs.

We could make a migration using vCenter, but for this, we will need a downtime for some hours. Our client wants to have the lowest downtime for the Oracle databases that are located on these 2 servers.

On ESX 3 we will install VEEAM 6.5. I read on the forum for multiple ways to do this. Because you have a greater experience, what do you think it could be the best way to do this, with the lowest downtime?

Thank you,
Liviu

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Liviu,

If you want to keep downtime to a minimum, then I would suggest using Migration Jobs that were specifically designed for these kind of scenarios.

Thanks!

[liviu.tutuianu]

Dear Vitaly,

Thank you. I will do so and will get back with a feedback.

Have a great day,
Liviu

[guru_reggie]

Hi guys,

I've got a similar situation here..

I've inherited an old ESX environment on 4.1... I've built a new environment on 5.1 and am in the process of migrating VMs from the old to the new (no shared storage etc).. I've manually moved the smaller ones with some downtime, but some are quite large and I'd like to move them without having a day or two of downtime

My question is - if I use Veeam to create a replica in the new environment, and then do a failover.... is it just a matter of deleting the original vm and the replication job and it's done..?? I'm cool if it's thin provisioned etc but are there any gotcha's that I may be missing..?

Thanks as always,
Mike...

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Michael,

is it just a matter of deleting the original vm and the replication job and it's done..??

Yes, that's correct, but if you're going to replicate a live VM, then you will have to power down this VM after initial replication and then re-run the replication job in order to transfer all latest changes.

I'm cool if it's thin provisioned etc but are there any gotcha's that I may be missing..?

Yes, you're are, but I would recommend to use migration jobs and not just replicas. The workflow of migration jobs is described in our User Guide (page 57).

Thanks!

[massimiliano.rizzi]

Hello experts,

we are working on a server consolidation project for a customer involving the migration of some existing physical production Windows servers to virtual machines running on a standalone VMware ESXi 5.1 host.

The destination VMware ESXi 5.1 host itself was one of the existing physical production Windows servers (an IBM System x3400 M3 running Windows SBS 2011 Standard) to be migrated to a virtual machine. Thanks to Double-Take Move, we have managed to migrate the source Windows SBS 2011 installation to a virtual machine running on a helper VMware ESXi 5.1 host.

After repurposing the existing physical server previously running Windows SBS 2011 and making it the new destination host for all VMs, we will need to migrate all VMs from the two helper IBM System x3400 M2 hosts running VMware ESXi 5.1 we have temporarily deployed back to the new destination host.

Between the various Veeam Backup & Replication features and utilities that can be used to migrate one or more VMs between standalone ESXi hosts, is there one you would recommend to migrate the Windows SBS 2011 VM (which is currently around 400 GB using thin-provisioned disks) with little downtime ?

If I’m not wrong this should be the case for Veeam Quick Migration without SmartSwitch, however based on my understanding it is not possible to choose when the cutover to the VM on the new destination host will happen.

My idea is currently to schedule a maintenance window, manually shut down the VM on the source helper host, create and run a Quick Migration job to migrate the VM to the new destination ESXi host and finally power it back on the new destination ESXi host.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and Regards,

Massimiliano