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Moving VCenter appliance and its external PSC from one host and storage to another host and storage

tnisupport
tnisupport asked
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I have a 6.5 VCenter instance with 2 clusters in a DataCenter.  The 6.5 instance is comprised of the VCA and an External PSC.  Cluster 1, which currently contains and hosts the VCA/PSC was the "original" cluster with 3 hosts, and all VM's have been migrated to Cluster 2, which also has 3 hosts in it.  So now all "regular" VM's have been moved and are running in Cluster 2, with the exception of VCA/PSC.

Cluster 1 hosts have shared SAS storage while Cluster 2 hosts have iSCSI shared storage.

I now need to move the VCA/PSC instances from the Cluster 1 host to a host on Cluster 2, so its both a host and storage change.

Once this is done, Cluster 1, its hosts and shared storage will be removed and decommissioned from VCenter.

What's the bet way to accomplish this?  I have looked at article 2058684, but I don't know that it addresses the move from the shared storage on Cluster 1 to the shared storage on Cluster 2.
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65tdRetired
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Commented:
So you want to move the VM files from cluster 1 storage to  cluster 2 storage, correct, could you use storage vmotion.
Or am I missing something?
tnisupport

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Commented:
From what I've read so far, I need to actually shut down the Vcenter and external PSC instances in order to move them, so I won't be able to be logged into VCenter to actually do the move, which I believe is needed for doing the vMotion/Storage vMotion.

Unless I'm not reading correctly??
65tdRetired
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Commented:

True.

One could login to a node of cluster two and import the VM's provide cluster 2 can see the storage on cluster 1.

See in the document under section - Registering Existing Virtual Machines in the VMware Host Client  : https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/vsphere-html-host-client-18-guide.pdf?hWord=N4IghgNiBcIJYFsAOB7ATgFwAQDcFYDUBZAdzDQFMsAJFAZ2wGEI4KA7bANgDoBWEAL5A


Maybe that will help...

tnisupport

Author

Commented:
I think that's part of my problem.  Cluster 2 hosts don't have SAS connectivity to the Cluster 1 host's storage (iSCSI) and vice versa.
Commented:
The solution that I found was to export the appliances as OVF files and then re-import them back into the new cluster/hosts.  Unfortunately, I was getting errors when doing the export and was unable to complete the migration in this fashion.

So, I'm in the process of rebuilding VCenter on the new hosts/cluster/storage.

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