Migrating vCenter Server Appliance to another host

[Simon771]

Hey guys,

Does anyone know we can use live migration from Veeam, to migrate vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 virtual machine to another host outside the cluster?
Currently we are running new ESXi 6.7 on our host, and on that host we also have Server Appliance for vCenter. We can't do live migration with vmware, since we are trying to migrate this virtual machine on another ESXi that isn't part of the cluster. Usually this would mean to turn off virtual machine and migrate it, but that surely won't work since when we turn off Server Appliance, what will make vMotion happen then …

So I'm wondering if we can use Veeam tool for that instead.

[Mehmoodows]

You may use Veeam's Quick Migration option.

Refer to below blog got detailed info:-
https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-move- ... otion.html

[foggy]

You can either use Quick Migration for that or replicate the vCenter Server VM and then make planned failover to ensure minimum downtime.

[Simon771]

Thanks to both of you.
We tried to do it with Quick Migration from Veeam software and it worked like a charm.
Appliance server was inaccessible for about 10 minutes, but we don't consider that as downtime, since all VMs were still working, we just couldn't manage them for those 10 minutes. Which wasn't a problem at all.

Anyway, it worked great

[mcz]

There's another solution if you can't or won't use the "veeam" approach: using OVF-templates like described in this article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2058684

[gparker]

You should be able to use vMotion, so long as both the source and target ESXi hosts are being managed by your vCenter Server and they both have access to the Datastore that your VCSA resides on. The target ESXi host does not need to be in the same cluster as the source ESXi host. Clustering is used for HA & DRS purposes.

[slk2k]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I am new to Veeam as I inherited a VMWare system with Veeam B&R (9.5).

In my case, it's a 3 host Essentials cluster (v6.5) and I want to move the VCSA appliance from Host1 to Host3. Obviously, no vMotion (not available in Essentials) and all 3 hosts are set up for local storage datastores so it means moving the VM to new physical disk (datastore) across the 1GB network link each host has (luckily plugged into the same L2+ switch). I would think that this action implies a Cold Migration (VMWare term), but with vSphere shut down, I'm not seeing an easy way to accomplish that. Then I tripped over this thread.

In the above case, the vSphere VM was moving clusters so that could imply a different datastore (but not necessarily). I was looking for some confirmation that I could perform the migration as outlined above (using Veeam Migration method). I would do this with the VCSA VM powered down and I expect 3-4 hours for the 290GB large (provisioned-sized per Veeam) VM. Clearly something to do out of hours.

Thanks!!!