Migrating from physical win VIC 6.5 to VCSA 6.7up1

Hi Ralph and Alex. I migrated vCenter from Windows to VCSA a few years ago. I believe I was running v5.5 on Windows, and the migration assistant took me to v6.0 on VCSA. I’ve since upgraded VCSA from v6 to v6.5, which is the same process really, so once you’ve done it once, get used to it, it’s how you’re going to upgrade vCenter going forward.

All that said, the Zerto piece was pretty straight-forward. I opened a support call prior to the upgrade, to ask the same questions you’re asking. Essentially the biggest part of all of this (as far as Zerto is concerned) is the vCenter database. You want to maintain the existing database, that is critical. If you do that, and you keep the vCenter name and IP address the same (which the migration assistant will do), then Zerto really won’t be impacted. Zerto support said I might need to re-register with vCenter, so I was ready to do that, but I ended up not having to.

Now, that’s when everything goes right. You should prepare yourself in the event all doesn’t go right. You should export your VPG configuration ahead of time, and anything else you might need, in the unlikely event that you have to rebuild your vCenter or use a fresh vCenter database. If that happens, then Zerto will be back to square-1 as well. You’ll have to delete all your VPG’s and set them up again. You can use the export to help with that process.

Hope this helps.

We’ve migrated from Windows based vCenters to the VCSA with Zerto in place, just need to keep the same vCenter database (the migration assistant should take care of that for you.).

Like Matthew said, it is a good idea to backup the Zerto configs, just in case the vCenter upgrade does go sideways. We’ve had that happen a few times, though they were Zertoless and we had rollback options.

Alex – The migration you’re outlining should not create new moid references. While yes, it’s changing from SQL to Postgre, all references are moved over, and as far as Zerto (or other products like Veeam) are concerned, it’s the same database. All critical information is transferred over.

As I said, I did this migration, and Zerto didn’t have any issues at all. That doesn’t mean you’ll have the same experience, I’m just sharing my experience with you.

If you’re a customer, I suggest opening a ticket with them just to double check everything. I mean you’re paying for support, why not use it? Seems logical to me.