Included in the newest release of Veeam Backup and Replication v10 a new feature was introduced to migrate VMs from a Hyper-V Backup to a VMware Cluster.
To learn more about this feature and the highlights click HERE!
This is a great opportunity to migrate your workload during a hardware (and software) refresh from Hyper-V Failover Cluster to your new and fresh VMware Cluster! The migration process won’t go without any downtime so make sure the services are redundant or the process is not during workdays and/or maintenance window.
In short the process would look something like this:
- Make sure to have a full backup of the VM which will be migrated
- VM is shut down (beginning of downtime)
- Start the backup job again to backup changed blocks
- Veeam Instant Recovery to vSphere to utilize V2V conversion
- VM will be made available in destination VMware cluster (end of downtime)
- VMware Storage vMotion VM to new datastore
- Start Veeam Migrate to Production wizard
- Stop publishing of Instant Recovery VM
- Configure VM for new backup job
Step 1: Update to the newest Veeam Backup and Replication v10 Release. Check out the “Veeam Upgrade Checklist“. I won’t go into detail as this process is well documented in the Knowledgebase and also at Jim Jones‘s blog koolaid.info.
Step 2: Add the target VMware vCenter Server to the Veeam console. This procedure is also well documented here.
Make sure to meet the requirements to run the virtual machine on the new infrastructure. Check the network configuration for example!
Step 3a: We use the Instant Recovery feature to migrate the virtual machine to the new infrastructure. So the latest backup set should be final to not lose data. So the source VM must be shutdown to create a latest backup set.
Step 3b: To make it more obvious, create a new backup job called “Migration_Job” and ad the source VM which you want to migrate. Furthermore, create this job while the VM is still running, run the backup job, shutdown the VM and rerun the backup job. This will further decrease the downtime of the VM as the job is saving the changed data since the last backup.
Step 4a: Select the VM and start the Instant VM recovery wizard.
Step 4b: Select the appropriate settings to fit the destination infrastructure. If you wish to have the VM online as soon as the conversion is finished, make sure to select the correct network.
Step 4c: You can choose to redirect the write cache to another datastore. Make sure not to select the final datastore to which the VM will be migrated later on using storage vMotion. Default is to use the store on the Veeam server, or in this case, I created a new LUN on the storage and configured it at the VMware ESXi host temporarily cache writes.
Step 4d: As mentioned in Step 4b, to make the VM available as soon as possible, configure the network at the destination. So you can use the option to power on and connect the VM after the conversion automatically.
Step 4e: Review the process and check the vCenter Server.
The VM will be published at the VMware vCenter Server and after the step “Performing V2V conversion” is done it will be powered on. You can view the status by opening the VM console and wait till the devices are ready.
Step 5: Use VMware Storage vMotion to migrate the VM from the attached Veeam NFS store used by the Instant Recovery to the new datastore. ( Pro tip: you can have multiple Instant Recovery sessions at once.)
Step 6: When the VM is fully migrated to the new infrastructure make sure to disable the CD-ROM drive which points to the Veeam NFS store. When the CD-ROM drive is still connected when the VM is unplublished it will cause the VM to be shutoff and unregistered!
Step 7a: Finish the migration process using the “Migrate to production” wizard.
Step 7b: Follow the wizard and make sure, that the details are all set. Opt out the “Delete source VM files…” at the end of the wizard and click “Finish”. The wizard will disable the Instant Recovery and check that all data was migrated. So without any further interruption the Veeam wizard has finished and the VM is successfully converted from Hyper-V to VMware!
Step ahead:
In addition to the conversion make sure that the VM which resides on the VMware Cluster will be backed up afterwards in a new backup job. Work through a recovery test to make sure the VM is backed up correctly.
Install VMware Tools.
Configure additional VM hardware settings e.g. “CPU Hot Plug” or VMXNET 3 adapter.
Set it up in the monitoring tool if available.
And many more…
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