How to migrate VM’s between two vCenter servers ? Is it possible ? Nothing is impossible in VMware world. VMware flings community has developed a cool tool is called “Cross vCenter Workload Migration” utility. Using this utility , you could simply migrate the VM from one vCenter server to another vCenter without any downtime using the Cross-vCenter vMotion feature. It’s completely user interface driven workflow for VM migration. It also support for batch migration of multiple VMs in parallel if the workload permits. Another highlight of this tool is , you don’t need a shared storage to perform the migration. It supports both Live & cold migrations.
This utility works only on VMware vSphere 6.0 and above versions. You could also migrate the VM’s between vSphere 6.0 and 6.5 version.
Let’s do the small test in LAB environment using this utility.
1.Download Cross vCenter Workload Migration utility from VMware labs on your laptop.
2. Unzip the file.
3. Open the command prompt and navigate to the directory where xvm-1.1.jar resides. Execute the following commands.
C:\test\xvm-1.1\xvm-1.1>java -jar xvm-1.1.jar
4. Once the utility is initialized like below , Open a browser.
C:\test\xvm-1.1\xvm-1.1>java -jar xvm-1.1.jar 00:06:36 INFO Starting ApiController on INL-JYWKG32 with PID 8128 (C:\test\xvm- 1.1\xvm-1.1\xvm-1.1.jar started by lingeswaran.rangasam in C:\test\xvm-1.1\xvm-1 .1) 00:06:36 DEBUG Running with Spring Boot v1.5.1.RELEASE, Spring v4.3.6.RELEASE 00:06:36 INFO No active profile set, falling back to default profiles: default 00:06:38 INFO HV000001: Hibernate Validator 5.3.4.Final 00:06:43 INFO Starting service Tomcat 00:06:43 INFO Starting Servlet Engine: Apache Tomcat/8.5.11 00:06:44 INFO Initializing Spring embedded WebApplicationContext 00:06:46 INFO Context refreshed 00:06:46 INFO Found 1 custom documentation plugin(s) 00:06:47 INFO Scanning for api listing references 00:06:47 INFO Initializing ProtocolHandler ["http-nio-8080"] 00:06:47 INFO Starting ProtocolHandler [http-nio-8080] 00:06:47 INFO Using a shared selector for servlet write/read 00:06:47 INFO Started ApiController in 12.323 seconds (JVM running for 18.047) 00:06:47 INFO Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility Initialized! 00:07:28 INFO Initializing Spring FrameworkServlet 'dispatcherServlet'
5. In the browser , access localhost with port 8080. [ http://localhost:8080/ ] . Click on “Migrate” to supply the required information for migration.
6. You must register the required site on this page for migration.
Example:
7. Register the second site with different vCenter.
8. Here is the list of registered sites with different vCenters.
9. You could go back to the command prompt and refer the logs if you get any errors while registering it.
01:44:43 INFO Registering site BLR for vc: 192.168.3.20 01:44:43 DEBUG Loading xvm keystore 01:44:57 DEBUG Getting certificate from VC: 192.168.3.20 01:44:57 DEBUG Obtained valid certificate for https://192.168.3.20/sdk 01:45:02 INFO Running session thread for 192.168.3.20 01:45:02 INFO Successfully registered site BLR 01:45:55 INFO Registering site CHE for vc: 192.168.3.22 01:45:55 DEBUG Loading xvm keystore 01:46:07 DEBUG Getting certificate from VC: 192.168.3.22 01:46:07 DEBUG Obtained valid certificate for https://192.168.3.22/sdk 01:46:11 INFO Running session thread for 192.168.3.22 01:46:11 INFO Successfully registered site CHE
10. Click on the migrate tab and enter the source & target information.
11. Once you click on submit , VM will migrate from one site (vCenter) to another site (vCenter).
So that test confirms that Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility just works well. You could give a try in test or LAB environment. Hope this article is informative to you.
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