we have four esx hosts over our 2 sites, one of which is not part of the cluster and only temporary, however this does contain some machines we need to keep. I am aware that with our license we can only have 3 hosts in a cluster so i don't think I can use VMotion to move them across.
i have read about ways to backup both the data and the configuration to a separate storage area and restore from there but i think i read that it wasn't supported?
so yeah just hopefully looking for information or advice on how is best to get this done, anything is appreciated!
As long as the VMs to move are located on a "paid" ESX(i) host, not on a free one, you can migrate them using either Quick Migration or Replication job. The later is preferable as it has Application Aware Image Processing functionality, using which the VMs can be properly quiesced. The "backup/restore" scenario is also fully supported, so, I'm not sure where you've read the opposite.
thank you for the quick response, we do unfortunately use the free version of the extra host as it was provided to us to only be a temporary solution, but as time went by we hosted several servers on there as the circumstance required it. is this going to create quite an issue?
my apologies with the backup and restore option confusion! i will have to track down where i read it!
we do unfortunately use the free version of the extra host as it was provided to us to only be a temporary solution
In this case, it will be impossible to migrate VMs residing on this host, as it host has certain API calls blocked that prevents us from doing our stuff. If applicable, you can download trial vSphere license in order to cover the said host temporarily and conduct migrating procedure.
