Transfering from Host to Host a VM that is totally on a SAN

[dpsmith]

Hello.
I'm a beginner with VMWare.
I have an old 2.5 Host that has 4 VMs on it that I want to transfer to a new reliable 5.0 Host.

I used vCenter Converter Standalone to transfer two of the VMs and everything went well.

(although I was unable to RDP to them until I changed the IP back to the original. It had picked up a DHCP IP#. I got a warning about have the same IP# on the virtual that which I thought was odd but it worked. Am I going to have a problem with that someday?)

The two other VMs though don't use local storage on the 2.5 Host at all.
Their datastores are all SAN volumes.
One has 3 volumes totalling 1.5 TB and the other uses about the same.

How do I transfer these two VMs to a different Host?
Just do the same a I did on the other two?
They are production servers and I want to be sure.
Anyone know the expected downtime for 1.5TB?
I only have about a 3 hour downtime window.

I'm thinking that where no data is actually changing location that move might be very fast.
I've tried looking this up but haven't had any luck.
Can anyone help me out?

Thanks.

 

[cabraun]

Regarding your NIC issue, this is because the NIC in v5 is different from the NIC in 2.5 and Windows still sees the original NIC with its static IP. I know you are saying "I looked in Windows networking and there is just the 1 new NIC. I even looked in Device Manager and there is just the 1 NIC"

So here is what you need to do:

Open a command prompt and type - set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 and hit enter. Then type devmgmt.msc and hit enter. Then click View > Show Hidden Devices

Now if you look at your NICs in device manager, you will see some things that you could not see before, including the original NIC that still has that static IP. Delete it.

You can also safely delete anything that is grayed out. If memory serves, the only thing that is not deletable is the RAS Async Adapter. Everything else that is grayed out, no longer exists, including disks, keyboards, mice, monitors, USB devices etc. If it is grayed out, it is safe to delete.

As far as migrating the 2.5 VMs to the 5.0 hosts. Off the top of my head, I am not sure if you can just remove them from inventory on the old hosts and add them to inventory on the new and then update the VM Hardware version or not. If so, that is a VERY easy process and will require very little downtime. If however there is just too much difference between 2.5 and 5 than you may need to follow a similar process as you did your first 2 with converter. I am not even sure if ESXi 5 will see the datastore formatted with whatever version of VMFS 2.5 used. You should probably do a bit of googleing or contact VMware to find out.

Or maybe someone else on here knows and can point you in the right direction on that aspect.

 

[dpsmith]

Thanks cabraun,
Good to know about the two different versions.

I've been asking around about how to determine if 5.0 will see 2.5's datastore format but haven't had any luck.

Can anyone else point me in the right direction?