Hey Brian,
@BrianWard has great suggestions. My comments here are based on experiences and what your project
might require as a best practice.
Whatever you do...TEST TEST TEST and TEST AGAIN.WAN speed is always the slowest link. I am fortunate to have a WDM PTP link between data centers. At times I have seen it max'd out during bulk migrations of various types. It works but WAN links are WAN links.
In my mind migrating a data center is a big deal whether it's private or hybrid cloud. You and I are thinking how do we forklift workloads doing the Star Trek Transporter trick from start to finish, with all the bits rebuilt to exact specs? A loss of one hair is.....a loss.
vMotion, Long Distance vMotion, Stretch Clusters, vReplication, Site Recovery Manager are purpose-built with thoughts and results in mind. Cross vCenter migrations have their own perils without the right tools and a clear understanding of how to be successful, the first time. VMware partners like Veem and Zerto certainly come to the table ready to play utilizing in-place APIs. Brian, you certainly have choices of tools.
Are you migrating VMware workloads to
AWS or
Google Cloud?
Check out this article on
vSphere 7 vMotion Enhancements HERE.
Here are free tools you might find useful for planning and testing purposes found at VMware Flings
-
Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility-
vSphere Replication Capacity PlanningI don't know if I am helping answer your question(s)
------------------------------
Keith Nunnery
@vmugkeithn
Las Vegas VMUG Co-Leader
VMUG US West Regional Champion Leader
------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 05-20-2020 07:08 AM
From: Brian Wall
Subject: Pre-staging vMotion across datacenters
Hi Keith, and thanks for the reply.
I've got a few tools in the toolkit. vSphere replication of course, but I also have a few Veeam and Zerto licenses that could accomplish the same thing. What I'm wondering about is doing this natively with vMotion. I had thought (again, fuzzy minds) that VMware had been talking about this feature in vMotion to assist with moving workloads to/across the cloud via slower WAN links. Perhaps I'm wrong?
Thanks!
------------------------------
Brian Wall
Original Message:
Sent: 05-19-2020 12:22 PM
From: Keith Nunnery
Subject: Pre-staging vMotion across datacenters
Hey Brian,
You have a very good question about Data Center Migration. Without knowing everything about your project my first suggestion to you is vSphere Replication. WAN speed is critical and if there is any doubt, then go slow. vRep and Site Recovery Manager will do what you are thinking about protecting the integrity of your VMs powered up or down, over slower WAN links.
------------------------------
Keith Nunnery
@vmugkeithn
Las Vegas VMUG Co-Leader
VMUG US West Regional Champion Leader
Original Message:
Sent: 05-18-2020 12:24 PM
From: Brian Wall
Subject: Pre-staging vMotion across datacenters
Hi all,
I am working on laying out a possible upcoming datacenter migration. My brain is a little fuzzy on this, but I seem to recall in some vSphere 6.7 discussions that vMotion was slated to support "pre staging", more or less, whereas the blocks are moved ahead of time. Since it's nearly impossible to know how long it will take to migrate a VM across a WAN connection, the idea was that you could do all of the heavy lifting ahead of time. When it comes to the final migration, vMotion just performs the final delta copy to complete the vMotion, in a more controlled manner. Does anyone know if this feature actually exists in the product? I've reviewed the 6.7 documentation, and also searched around, but I can't seem to find any references to it.
Thank you!
------------------------------
Brian Wall
------------------------------