Moving VMs to new physical location

[zoltank]

So, my company is moving, and I'm thinking through how I want to move all my VMs to the new location (2.5TB total) which is about 3 miles (5km) distant. The new office location will have a new virtual environment and all the old hardware will be staying at the old office. The VMs NEED to be moved the weekend of the move, so I'm thinking of a "defense in depth" strategy. After I lay out my plan I'd love to here any issues with it and any better alternatives.

We plan on using Veeam backups to do the move.

1. The primary Veeam transport will be a workstation with mirrored 3TB SATA hard drives. We'll run regular back jobs on it to the weekend of the move the backups will just need to be refreshed. This will give up storage and Veeam server all in one, easily transportable box.
2. I have an ESXi test lab server here with plenty of storage. I'm going to build a Windows VM on there, install VM, and give the VM enough storage to hold all our backups. If something happens top the workstation then I can lug this to the new location.
3. I have a 4 drive external JBOD which I plan to install 4 2TB SATA drives in, and then split my backups between two pairs of drives (so two complete set of backups across two 2TB drives each). I can always remove the drives from the external enclosure and install them in any desktop, install Veeam, and start restoring my VMs.

I figure this way I can still quickly get my VMs transported to the new location, and I have multiple fall backs in case something goes wrong.

We will, of course, do several test restores at the new location before the date of the move.

[skrause]

Do you have a decent network pipe between the two locations?

You could set up a bunch of replication jobs, seed them either by using the source backup files you mentioned moving, or by running the replication jobs and transferring the data that way.

Then, when the weekend of the move rolls around, run the replication job to copy the final changes over and do a permanent failover to the VMs in the new location.

[zoltank]

100mb at both locations.

I'm just worried about how long pushing those final changes would take.

[skrause]

You might try seeding one of your highest change rate VMs from a backup and then running a sync a day or two later and seeing how long that takes. It would at least give you something to measure by.

Depending upon how much downtime your various servers can handle, you might do a mix of doing the replication for the more critical and/or low change rate VMs and the backup/truck/restore method for VMs that can be offline for longer and/or have high change rates.

[csinetops]

I went through this same thing but on a much larger scale over a month or so. I moved ~110 VM's and ~20TB of data over a 400mb PTP. Just set up replication jobs and leave them synching on a schedule. As long as you don't have a insane change rate, you shouldn't need to transfer much data every day to keep them in sync.

When I performed my planned failovers and final failovers it took sub 20 minutes down time for each VM. Really slick! I planned my failovers for right after the

Let me know if you have any questions.

[WRS2200]

Thank you for the post. I was contemplating performing a similar move. This seems to be the best way.