This transcript is from Stormind Studios Vblog: Your New Years’ Resolution: Migrate! Windows vCenter to vCSA
Hi, Vince Rightley of Stormwind studios. As we’re preparing for next year’s projects, next year’s budget, whatever we’re planning, one of the things that we should put at the top of the list is the migration of our Windows vCenter, over to the new vCenter server appliance, which is running VMware’s photon OS, which is a Linux distribution that VM Wares created. And why do we want to do that? Many of you are aware, I’ve told my classes this, and you’ve probably heard me and others say this as well. Last year around, right before VM World, so the August time frame, end of August, it was announced that, here, it was announced that the next full release of vSphere would be the last version of the Windows vCenter support.
Now, VMware’s always been clear in their direction, and this pretty much sums it up. So, they want you to use this vCenter server appliance, and I know some of you ar like, “I don’t want to do Linux. How do I migrate?” All of this. There was at one point, out at labs.vmware.com/flings, a migration assistant that allowed you to do that, and then it was gone for a little bit. In version 6.5 of vSphere there is a migration assistant, and a migration tool, that you can actually migrate. So they’ve made it easy for you.
Now, what you don’t want to do is get caught up at the very end, where all of a sudden now I’m forced to do it. Plan it out, plan it so you’ve got time to do it, and get it squared away. Now, there’s a couple of things here that you can look at, as we have these tools. So, as I mentioned, there’s part of the installer, but there’s also a migration assistant, and this is going to go through and allow you to do some pre-checks, to see what’s going on, what it’s going to look like, and so on and so forth, and then you can go in and actually do the migration of this.
Now, I want to walk you through the installation of this. Now, I’m not going to go through the howl process, but just to show you how easy it is, I want to kind of walk you through this real quickly. So, if we open up the installer you’ll notice that there are two, and this is the vSphere 6.5 vCenter deployment. So we’re going to go into the, there’s a command line interface, for you command line people, there’s also a user interface. There are three versions of this, the installer client, I can do it on Linux, I can do it on Mac, or I can do it on Windows and this is something that’s new in 6.5 as well.
So here’s the new installer for Windows. You’ll notice up at the top I can do an install, I can do an upgrade. That’s actually how I want to do an upgrade from previous version of the Linux appliance, to the new version. There is a migrate, and then something new in 6.5, also that we talk about in class, is the restore, where we can actually built into the vCenter service appliance is the native backup and restore, and we can utilize the restore function on this as well.
Again, real quick, just walking you through this, and the reason I’m shoeing you this is to get you to do it. A New Year’s resolution, if you will. Start it now. We want to make sure, and VMware wants to make sure that you’re getting this migration done, and it’s not that hard. Obviously you’re going to have to plan, and make sure you go through and check off all the check boxes in the pre-check, but it’s fairly simple to do. Even I can do it, so there you go.
So, again, real quick, walking through this there’s two stages to it. You’ll notice stage one, this is deploying the appliance. So this is actually going to deploy an appliance, and then this is going to pull all your data from the existing vCenter server that you have on Windows, and pull that over. Now, of course you have to read all 52 pages of the end user license agreement, click on next, and here’s where you’re going to enter the source Windows server.
So that fully qualified domain name, that migration assistant port, and then SSO user ID, and the SSO password. Again, as we enter that information, and yours is going to vary based upon your particular environment, the whole point to this is, as we’re getting ready to get into the new year, as we’re getting ready to get into the new budget cycle, into the new project list, make sure that we’re thinking about migrating to this vCenter server appliance. We don’t want to wait until the end when we’re forced to do it. I would much rather plan and be prepared for it, than I would where I’m forced to do it and I’m kind of crunching that in.
So, hopefully you found this easy, one of the things that we talk about in class as well, is actually how to do this migration, we talk about topology changes, so on and so forth. So, thank you for watching, take care, have a great day.
This transcript is from Stormind Studios Vblog: Your New Years’ Resolution: Migrate! Windows vCenter to vCSA
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