The feedback from our customers on both the initial release of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool (vSphere 6.0 Update 2m) as well as the updated version included in the release of vSphere 6.5 has just been absolutely fantastic! The feedback has not only been positive in terms of customers experience with using the Migration Tool to go from a Windows-based vCenter Server to the VCSA, but also with their experience with the VCSA itself which has come a long from when it was first released back with vSphere 5.0.
As with any customer feedback (good as well as the bad), I share this feedback directly with the Engineering/Product teams so that they know which areas customers have found useful and which areas we can still improve upon. One source of customer feedback which I see quite a bit of discussions on regarding the VCSA Migration Tool is on Twitter and being an active user myself, it is also makes it quite easy to collect and share this feedback internally. I even created the #migrate2vcsa hashtags a few years back to make it easy for customers to provide feedback for all things related to the VCSA Migration.
Most recently, I was looking for a better way to share as well as aggregate some of the feedback from Twitter regarding the VCSA Migration Tool. Instead of manually tracking individual tweet links via an email or document, I wanted to anyone to be able to get a quick glance at the overall feedback. I started to look around and came across an interesting SaaS solution called Storify which allows you to tell "stories" by using content from various Social Media sources such as blog posts, Youtube or Twitter for example.
I experimented around with Storify over the weekend and created a vCommunity "short" or short stories about the VCSA Migration sourced from Twitter. I think this can be useful for both internal folks as well as external, especially for customers who might still be hesitant to make the move to the VCSA and would like to hear from others who have made the move and not looked back 🙂 You can access the short by visiting http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/lamw/migrate2vcsa-stories/blob/master/migrate2vcsa-Storify.html (short url: vmwa.re/migrate2vcsastories) which I have also embedded into this blog article below.
I want to also give a huge thanks to those of you who have shared your feedback on Twitter. If there are others who wish to be included, feel free to drop me a note on Twitter or leave a comment here to the tweet link and I will be sure to include it. Make sure to use the #migrate2vcsa hashtag for any feedback (good or bad!) as that is something I and others monitor closely on Twitter.
I can't share the same sentiments with our experience migrating to the VCSA. We've tried to migrate our two 5.5 vcenters to 6.0U2 and both have failed. On one of them, we gave up and built a new vcenter and just moved the hosts to the new one, ditching the performance and audit logs. (luckily, we aren't using dvswitching).
The other vcenter, we've tried a little harder on and on a call to support, they recommended against the migration assistant and do the same thing as our first one as there's very little in the migration logs to pinpoint where it's failing.
The other recommendation was to stay far away from esxi 6.5 and go with 6.0U2.
Try to ask about customer satisfaction w/ the web client/new viClient(HTML5) ...
Don't be dissapointed about the answer. ( my opinion: VMware isn't listening to the customers; quality/usability/performance/work efficiency is awful against the old viClient; they should reinvent and port it to other OS')