using Quick Migration to Move Vcenter appliance from VVOL to VMFS6 datastore

[noworriesm8PL]

Vmware essentials plus, so do not have vmotion license for storage.
Doing this on Saturday.
Any Caveats to look for, such as having to unregister VM and the reregister it? I have used quick migrate on VMs, but never the Vcenter that controls everything. This was the quickest way with the elast downtime that I found.

Backstory: Had a hard 8 hour power and both Internet ISPs outage over the summer where it was raining so hard I couldnt get into the office to control shutdown.
that caused all of the VMs to not be able to see the virtual machines on our Nimble (except the 2 that were on VMFS volumes) This caused much downtime with Vmware support being obtuse as hell for 18 hours until HPE Nimble support got me back up and running in 10 minutes after VMWARE (utter crap) support couldnt help me except saying rebuild. This was the first downtime window I could get that I wasnt also having planned surgery., or recovery. HPE recommended moving the Vcenter off VVOL, and I agree. I inherited this from previous admin team.(that used this company as a learning piggybank.. and not for things this company needed)

[Mildur]

Hello Josh

Any Caveats to look for, such as having to unregister VM and the reregister it?

You probably do not want to unregister all VMs from the vCenter. If you do so, new backup chains (with Active Fulls) will be started for every VM you have re-registered.

I see multiple options:
Option 1): Add your ESXi hosts as standalone host to move the vCenter VM with Quick Migration. You cannot use Quick Migration through the vCenter for the vCenter appliance itself. It must be online all the time to manage the migration process. Therefore the migration must be done through the ESXi hosts.
Option 2): Shut down the old vCenter VM, clone the VM outside of Veeam (or restore from a backup) to the new datastore. Power it on.
Option 3): Use a Veeam replication job from ESXI Host to ESXI host to create a copy of the vCenter Appliance. Then failover to the replica and perform a permanent failover.
Option 4): Use file based backup & restore from vCenter to migrate the entire configuration to a newly deployed vCenter appliance.

Disclaimer: We don't run specific tests on vvol to vmfs scenario for vCenter appliances. Please make sure, that you have an active VMware support contract. If vCenter has any problems to start it's services on the new datastore, you may have to call VMware support to get the appliance running again. Also take a file based backup of your vCenter configuration before you begin (VmWare recommended backup):
- https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphe ... D7EA4.html

Best,
Fabian

[noworriesm8PL]

I have option 1 allready set. I had added the individual hosts awhile ago just in case Vcenter was ever.. gone.

and have option 4 ready to fire from my hip if needs be. Been running the file based plus Vcenter backup with veeam since I took over this account. Even have the original ISO for VCSA ready.

Thank you for the response!

[Mildur]

You're welcome.
If you like, please report back how the migration went. It may help others in the future.

Best,
Fabian