migration

How to tell if your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) was migrated from a Windows vCenter Server?

09.19.2016 by William Lam // 2 Comments

In case you had not heard, last week VMware had officially released the VCSA Migration Tool which is included in the new vSphere 6.0 Update 2m release. Customers can now easily migrate from a Windows based vCenter Server over to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) all while preserving their existing vCenter Server configurations and integrations. For more details, I highly recommend you check out all the links and resources here related to the VCSA Migration Tool.

One interesting question that came up over the weekend from a troubleshooting standpoint was how do you tell if your VCSA was migrated from a Windows vCenter Server? Besides remembering 😉 there is actually a pretty simple way to check by looking at the install parameters as I have previously written about here. To do so, you will need to SSH to your VCSA and enable the Bash Shell first. Once that has been done, go ahead and run the following command:

install-parameter upgrade.source.platform

If your VCSA was migrated from a Windows based vCenter Server using the new VCSA Migration Tool, you should see a value of windows. If you do not get any results, then it means the VCSA was not migrated and it was freshly deployed as an appliance.

In addition, you can also check whether or not you had migrated over the original vCenter Server's Stats, Events and Tasks (SET) data. To do so, run the following command:

install-parameter upgrade.user.options

You should get back a value of either yes or no for migrating over the SET data.

Lastly, if your VCSA was migrated from a Windows based vCenter Server, you can even tell if the migration was done so using the UI or CLI. To do so, run the following command:

install-parameter upgrade.silent

You should get back a value of either True for a CLI-based migration or False for a UI-based migration.

Here is a quick screenshot of running the three commands on a VCSA that was migrated.

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool officially GAs w/vSphere 6.0 Update 2m

09.15.2016 by William Lam // 45 Comments

Today, I am very happy to announce that we have released the official Windows vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool which is part of the new VCSA vSphere 6.0 Update 2m release! I know many of you have been asking for an update since we released the VCS to VCSA Convert Appliance Fling a little over a year ago. The Fling was pretty limited in functionality and this was by design so that we could quickly get something out to our customers and get some early feedback. Although I could not say anything, the VMware Engineering team have been very hard at work incorporating all of the feedback in how they designed and built the official VCSA Migration Tool that you see today.

With that, I would like to extend a huge thanks to all of our customers who took part in the Fling and provided feedback both in the comments section as well as reaching out to me through the various channels. It was great to engage with literally hundreds of customers of all sizes and segments, all looking to move away from a Windows-based vCenter Server to the VCSA. Lastly, I want to thank our VMware Engineering team, both to the folks who lead the initial effort on the Fling prototype to those who then productized it! I was very fortunate to have been part of this amazing milestone at VMware.

The VCSA Migration Tool workflow is quite different from how the Fling had worked which hopefully customers will appreciate. The team worked really hard on trying to simplify the overall user experience as well as trying to minimize the overall amount of downtime for the migration. In addition, we have also added full support for additional configurations and deployment topologies which you can find more details in the resource link below which includes an FAQ which I *highly* recommend folks have a look at before starting or asking further questions.

Collection of all #migrate2vcsa Links / Resources: vmwa.re/migrate2vcsalinks

Here is a quick video that I had recorded earlier which demonstrates a migration from a Windows vSphere 5.5 environment to VCSA 6.0 Update 2m, hopefully this will give you a nice overview of the migration process.

[UI Demo] - Migration of Windows vCenter Server 5.5 to vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 Update 2m from lamw on Vimeo.

One last thing I want to quickly mention is that this release is specifically targeted at customers looking to migrate from a Windows vCenter Server 5.5 to the VCSA 6.0 Update 2, hence the letter "m" denotation. If you are NOT looking to migrate your Windows vCenter Server to the VCSA, this release is NOT applicable to you as you will NOT be able to perform a new install and/or upgrade using this release. Instead, you should be looking at the vSphere 6.0 Update 2 release which is the exact same code base that vSphere 6.0 Update 2m is based off of. This will be even more apparent when you launch the VCSA Installer, as the "Migrate" button is the only option as shown in the screenshot below.

For those planning to attend VMworld this year, we do plan to have several sessions covering the new VCSA Migration Tool as well as some other surprises 🙂 I hope to see you there and if you have any comments or feedback, feel free to leave it here or use the #migrate2vcsa hashtag if you are on Twitter, especially if you are interested in some of the surprises at VMworld.

Windows Server 2012 fix is out for the VCS to VCSA Migration Fling!

01.05.2016 by William Lam //

Happy New Years everyone! Here is the first post of 2016 🙂

I know many of you have been anxiously waiting for a fix to the Winexe bug that causes the VCS to VCSA Migration Fling to fail when migrating from a vCenter Server that runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (includes R2) OS to the VCSA. It has taken a bit longer than we all had hoped due to legal reviews and such, but today I am please to announce that we now have an updated release to the VCS to VCSA Migration appliance (v0.9.1). For customers using Windows Server 2012, WinRM will be used instead of Winexe due to the Windows bug that has been identified and will require a couple of additional configurations on the source Windows vCenter Server prior to starting the migration process. For more details, please refer to the documentation on the Fling site. Customers using Windows Server 2008, Winexe will continue to work as it does today.

In addition to this fix, we also now support specifying a custom port for the Microsoft SQL Server Database in case you had changed it from the default of 1433, which a few customers have asked for.

I would like to give a big thanks to both Mike and Ravi for working tirelessly on getting this fix out as soon as they could along with all the legal hurdles. Let us know if you have any feedback by either leaving a comment below or better yet, interact with the Engineers by leaving a comment on the Fling site!