vCenter re-IP and rename - how to migrate Horizon Pools

[Gabrie1]

Hi,
The current vCenter is in a VLAN that we need to remove from our network, so the vCenter will be moved to a new VLAN (re-IP) and we've also decided to connect to the vCenter over a different name, remark: the real name of the vCenter doesn't change! Also the new name is accessible already.

We're thinking of the following migration scenario:
- create a new composer server
- add the same vcenter under different name to Horizon with the new composer
- recreate every pool for the "new" vCenter but same golden image, same cluster and datastores.

Questions:
- Is this the easiest scenario?
- Has the PowerCLI for Horizon enough cmdlets to help with this task?
- Or would it be possible to edit a config / database to just simple rename the vCenter in Horizon?

[Jubish-Jose]

Not sure if you already took a look at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/95401 ?

[Gabrie1]

Thank you, the link has some helpful info for us but mostly on the pool part, not on how to change the vCenter name. 

[Jubish-Jose]

Agree. That one points to https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/57368 where it mentions about migrating  to a new VC and I guess renaming will have the same impact.

Its been a long time since I worked on Linked clones so I may be wrong, but can't we just rename the VC name in the Connection Server's the ADAM DB, take a backup of the Composer, and then restore it?

Take a backup of the ADAM DB and replace the VC URL under OU=Properties > OU=VirtualCenter > pae-VCURL and Composer URL at pae-SVIURL with the new ones. This should be reflected immediately in the Horizon Admin UI. See if the Composer operations work fine. If not, take a backup of the CS which will also take a backup of the Composer DB. Then restore the Composer backup using sviconfig -restorebackup.

I am not 100% sure if this will work as the Composer DB may still have references to the linked clones based on the old VC/SVI names, but I think its worth a try.

If the above method does not work, I guess we need to recreate the pools after pointing to the new VC and Composer.

[Gabrie1]

Thank you. Will need to build a test environment for this, but sounds like a good plan to give this a shot.