asked on

How to properly move two VM's from one host to another.

I have purchased a new server to host both my RDP servers that are running on a less than adaqute host and would like to move them to this new server/host. I am running ESXi 6.0 and have these servers registered on vSphere. The server(s) are using local storage but the new server is using SSD's vs 10k hard drives. Also, the new server has 10gb NIC's instead of 1gb NIC's so this should improve speed as well.

My question is can I move these two VM's from one host to another both at the same time or do I need to migrate one at a time. Also, on the current server I have two iSCSI connections to this host however I do not use storage on either of the NAS devices so do I need to disconnect the iSCSI connections before migration? If so how do I do this? I have looked on the net and found how to create the iSCSI connections but not how to remove them.

Also, is there way to backup the complete configuration of the host or will snapshots be enough if the migration goes bad and I need to revert back to the original server and configuration.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

Tim

ASKER

That is very helpful and will probably use the Clone/Copy function to do this move. Now on the removing of iScsi connections is there a way to do that? I ask because I was trying to reconfigure this machine in order to give each VM their own NIC but it said I couldn't move the VM because of the iSCSI connection. Maybe I was mistaken by what the error message said but would like to know who to do this if needed.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

If you have enabled iSCSI on the host, you cannot disable it.

But you can remove the bindings, and network interfaces for it.

Not sure why you want to give each VMs it's own nic....

Tim

ASKER

Thank you Andrew. I am still learning VM and you seem to always have the right answers. I wanted to have seperate NIC's for a VM on the host as a means of increasing the speed of the VM. I have two RDP servers with 35 users on each going through a 1GB NIC and felt it was bottle-necking my throughput. I have since migrated those RDP servers to a new host with faster CPU's and 10gb NIC's which seem to handling the load just fine.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

Just create a vSwitch, with at least two network interface uplinks, and connect all VMs to that vSwitch.

Make sure you are using the VMXNET3 in the VM, NOT the E1000!

I think you will find the network interfaces were not the bottleneck.