Cold migration vs backup remapping

[danswartz]

I currently have 2 broadwell xeons in a 2-node HA cluster with a hyper-converged storage appliance on each node. I'm thinking of repurposing one of the xeons as a dedicated storage server. My thought is to leave one of the storage appliances as-is, so if I need to reboot the storage server, I can failover the storage to that storage appliance (the two VSA currently connect to a dual-head JBOD, using pacemaker/corosync as the cluster SW). That part is easy. The trickiness is: how do I handle the case where the sole remaining vsphere host needs to be upgraded? The 6.7 upgrade manager uses vcenter, so there is a chicken&egg problem. I have an old sandy bridge server I can power up and add to the cluster to migrate 3-4 of the critical guests to (but they would need to be cold migrated.) The sticking point is the vcenter server appliance. Does veeam cold migration require vcenter? If not, will it retain the existing morefid? That is an issue, since my backup jobs are set to delete no longer used VMs after awhile. Alternatively, I guess I can shutdown the VCSA, login to broadwell, remove VCSA from inventory, login to sandy bridge, add to inventory, power up VCSA, do the upgrade, reverse the remove&add sequence, and then edit the backup job(s) [i have a daily, weekly and monthly that would need to be fixed up - yuck!] For each of those jobs, remove the now 0-length VM, add the VCSA from the repository, then map the backup job to that backup chain. Is this really the best way to do this? It's not like I have to update vsphere often, but I'd rather not have to jump through these hoops, if there is something cleaner I am missing

[Andreas Neufert]

Veeam Quick Migration can not keep the moref ID as there is no VMware API call for it.

Maybe backup the VMs before a planned downtime window and do not change the host for the VMs during esxi update?

[danswartz]

That helps with everything but the VCSA. I can't do the update manager updates without it running Thanks for the answer about cold migration. I had a feeling that would be a NO