vMotion between to vCenter servers

[ascheale]

Hi,

we have to vcenters with one cluster at each site.

both vcenters running linked mode.

Connection between the two sites is 2GBit/s dark fibre.

Is there a way to vmotion vms from one vcenter to another ?

We are currently running on vsphere 5.0

kind regards

Alex

[TomHowarth]

unfortunately not.  you will have to remove from inventory on vCenter 1 and add to inventory on vCenter 2, this is assuming that the hosts that are attached to either cluster can see the same datastore.

[ascheale]

hi tom,

thank you for that ... i know this sadly.

My suggestion was that someone says .."hey do it this way - it just works"

Do you know if there is something planned for the future ?

Thing is, my customer started with 2 clusters, 1 small and 1 big.

Now he has two big clusters but not equal distributed.

So customer has to manually shutdown vm, deregister, register and so on ...

kind regards

Alex

[schepp]

Hi Alex,

well VMware and Cisco have already shown us long distance vMotion:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns517/ns224/ns836/white_paper_c11-557822.pdf

But it comes with many requirements, like minimum bandwidth, maximum latency between the sites, shared storage, 1 vCenter managing both sides, same Subnets, etc.

It sounds like your customer only got a SAN on one of the 2 sites?

I recently tested vMotion across my two sites. But they are only 2-3km apart from each other and connected with a 10Gbit/s optical fibre.

Bot sites hosts mounted a shared storage with iSCSI and I was able to migrate VMs across both sites. Both sites are managed by the same vCenter.

Regards

Tim

[ascheale]

customer has two identical sites and two mirrored sans prtected with site recovery manager.

but - both clusters are not evenly distributed

Alex

[farri304]

You could also try exporting the VM as an OVF from the one environment and importing it into the new one. I've had to do this many times for lab testing.

[TomHowarth]

unfortunately VMware to not openly talk about futures.  I suggest that you arrange for an NDA breifing with your Sales rep or TAM

[chootmang]

Hey there, I was just searching for the same thing after going from one vcenter to multiple. But in case it helps, I use vCenter Converter Standalone to move a vm to a new location. Of course bandwidth plays a role, but this is what I have been using and generally works. I have ran this from a Win 7 vm and from Server 2008 and worked equally as reliable.