Moving ESXi 4.1 Hosts into a V center setup

We have also installed V center on a new VM . Can we just migrate the existing ESXi hosts into the V  center setup or will I lose my production VM's. Can this be done live or should servers (vm;s) be shutdown

Hi,

You can do this live. Open your vSphere client, create a new Datacenter, then right click the Datacenter and add Host. Just follow the on screen prompts and you will be fine.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Ianmellor,

That's what I thought, I just didnt want to do it and lose the configuration or VM's since I havent done it before and it is production.

IS there anything else I should be aware of, or should it be straight forward

Hi,

No it is straight forward, your vCenter should be the same vesion level or higher than your hosts. Once you have added your hosts you can create a HA cluster and drag your hosts into that, no need to shutdown VM's.

Cheers,

Everything above is correct, there will be no production impact, your vCenter version must be the same version as ESX or higher version.  Also, make sure DNS is configured properly with forward adn reverse entries for your vCenter and ESX servers otherwise the operation will fail.  IF these hosts are currently managed by another vCenter installation you will get a message that pops up and you can just say OK and acknowledge that they can only be managed by one instance of vCenter and continue with the operation so the new vCenter version is now taking over ESX management.  

NOTE - The process of adding a host to vCenter actually installs the vCenter agent on the host.  There may be times when you lose responsiveness from vCenter to the host, and there are times that removing the host from the vCenter inventory and adding it back in will actuall uninstall the vCenter agent on the host and then reinstall it hence fixing the issue.  You can also restart vCenter agent services on the ESXi host by enabling local or remote support from the local server console and then log into ESX and restart the service.. see this article for detailed information about managing this agent:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1003490

 

thanks