Replicating HW10 to HW9

[Jim Mc]

Hi there,

I'm having trouble replicating some virtual machines which are HW version 10, because the destination platform is vSphere 5.1 and only supports HW version 9.

Is there any way I could use a script to convert the VM during the replication? Even if unsupported? As I understand it's possible to downgrade from HW10 to HW9 by modifying a line in the VNX file?

Many thanks,


Jim

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jim,

You can use one of the suggested links below to do that, as for downgrading hardware version on the fly I'm not sure there is a trivial way to achieve that:
http://www.vladan.fr/three-ways-downgra ... e-version/
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=1028019

Thanks!

[Jim Mc]

Hi thanks for that but I don't want to downgrade the virtual machine on the source VM, I only wish to do this dynamically on the destination.

Unfortunately Veeam 8 complains that it is unable to replicate the VM due to the hardware version, so I need some method of converting the VNX when it is replicated to the destination vSphere.

The only feature difference between HW10 and HW9 seems to be a SATA controller and the customer is not using that, but does not wish to have downtime associated with downgrading the source VM. Also unfortunately the destination vsphere cannot be upgraded at this present time. So I was hoping a dynamic conversion would be a possibility?

Perhaps this could be possible through some sort of ignore compatability/force replication option followed by a post replication script to downgrade the HW version?

Many thanks,

James

[Vitaliy S.]

Perhaps this could be possible through some sort of ignore compatability/force replication option followed by a post replication script to downgrade the HW version?

This could be an option, though the VM would not start without this downgrade.

What you could do as a workaround is to use either VM copy job or file copy job, second should definitely allow you to transfer files to the destination host and then adjust the hardware config to be compatible with HW9.