I recently had to move all resources under two vCenter Servers to two different vCenter Servers.  Then retire the source vCenter Servers. Both source vCenter Servers were in the same SSO domain. Fortunately, the source did not have many hosts and VMs and I wanted to bring over as much as I could.

I wanted to do my best not to leave anything behind at the destination vCenter Server. Most are obvious in my list below, but some may be easily forgotten if not used often. Below is a list of what I moved over and other settings to note in case moving to a completely new vCenter Server. A few have export/import wizards in vCenter and can of course be scripted for several others.

• vDS – export/import
• Host profiles – export/import
• Customization specification – export/import
• Custom attributes – output in RVTools
• Folders – output in RVTools
• Permissions
• Roles
• vCenter Settings – SMTP, database retention policy, etc
• Alarms – custom/edited alarms
• vCenter Server License
• Cluster settings – HA, DRS, and EVC
• Datastore clusters
• Tags
• Content libraries
• Scheduled tasks

There are some third party apps to keep in mind. Make sure to reconfigure backups to point to the new vCenter Server. Third party plug-ins will need to be registered to the new vCenter Server.

Here are somethings not to worry about since they pertain to the hosts and remain with or without a vCenter Server.

• Standard switches
• Access to fiber channel storage
• VM settings and notes

Events and tasks for a VM will persist when the VM is in the new vCenter Server. However, performance data for VMs is lost. Also, performance data, events, and tasks for hosts will be lost when a host is added to a new vCenter Server.

The next articles will focus on two different ways I migrated the hosts to the new vCenter Servers.

Migrate Resources to a New vCenter Server (Part 1)
Migrate resources to a new vCenter Server – Methods for Migrations (Part 2)
Migrate resources to a new vCenter Server – Cross vCenter vMotion Utility (Part 3)
Migrate resources to a new vCenter Server – Unregister old vCenter Servers (Part 4)