Last week I had to migrate ESXi Host from 1 vCenter to Another. Following are the reason why
We had vCenter Linux Appliance which has limitation of 5 Hosts and 50 VMs (Don’t ask the reason why we did this. Answer is Commercial aspect J)
We had reached the near the limit so we decided to move to Windows based vCenter along with SQL Server
Setup
VMware vCenter 5.1
VMware ESXi 5.1
Port Groups on Local vSwitches
PVLAN Configured on the Distributed Switch
Procedure
Following procedure was followed for migration
- Create Windows VM
- Install vCenter 5.1
- Backed up of Distributed Switch along with Port Group from Source VC
- Restore Distributed Switch along with Port Groups to Destination VC (New one )
- Disconnect Hosts from old vCenter and add it to vCenter
- Verify the Servers are accessible
- Verify PVLAN Configuration is intact
Observations
- manually create the distributed switch and the restore the configuration which included all port groups and its configuration along with PVLAN
- Restoration only happens via web client
- Post Migration of ESXi Hosts it didn’t map to the distributed switch automatically
- Had to manually add the Host to VDS (Distributed Switch )
- Port Group mapping went to Invalid Backing State
- As soon as I added the Host manually to VDS we only connectivity to PVLAN IPs as the Port Group mapping was in Invalid Backing State. Had to manually mapping of Port Group