UC Applications Migration between UCS Servers

[ln33147]

Dear Members,

We are planning to migrate our UC applications (CUCM, CUC & IM&P) from Cisco UCS-C240-M4 servers to BE7H-M4 servers due to the EoL of the old servers.

As far as I understood from the posts on the community, this migration is to be done through VMWare features (VMotion, "Host to Host Migration", "Cold Migration")..

For those who did such migrations, could you please let me know which VMWare option you have used and what is Cisco's recommendation..  Would appreciate any help on this as I'm not coming from a Systems background.

Thanks in advance.

[Nithin Eluvathingal]

Are you upgrading the applications while migrating ? If yes, PCD is the Best option.

[ln33147]

Hello Nithin,

Thank you for taking the time to respond. The plan is to migrate the VMs without upgrading the applications running on them since they are on the latest versions.

As for PCD, we have many bad expereinces with it, we tried to use it many times to migrate CUCM clusters to new servers and we ended up doing the migrations manually after engaging Cisco TAC. In order not to waste time with PCD I would prefer to do it manually from the beginning.

Have you done any migrations using VMWare?

Regards,

[b.winter]

Export the VM from the old ESXi and import them on the new server. Check the VMware docs how this works.
Or you setup a new cluster with the same version on the new UCS and restore the config from a backup from the old cluster.

I bet you will find a lots of old posts asking exactly the same questions, so you better look the forum first.

[ln33147]

Do you suggest doing it through VMware or DRS?

[b.winter · Accepted solution]

Depends what you favor more. In both scenarios, you will have downtimes of your old cluster.

Scenario VM export: You need to shut down the servers. Then export the machines and import them on the new UCS.

Scenario DRS:
While setting up the new cluster, you either need to shut down the old cluster or at least disconnect the virtual NIC of the VM's. Because you can't have multiple servers running with the same IP and the new cluster nodes shouldn't see the old cluster nodes.
If you use DRS, then you can split up the work: one maintanence window for setting up the new cluster and a second for shutting down the old cluster and restoring the backup into the new one.
But if you do it on a weekend, then you should have enough time to do everything all at once.

[ln33147]

Thank you for the helpful reply. I would go with the VM Export option since it will also be applicable to migrating UCCE VMs (another upcoming project). 

[Roger Kallberg]

If you're only doing a migration/move of the VM and if you have vCenter I would recommend that you use vmotion to move the VMs from the old host to the new. This could be done without having the VM shutdown before if the target host matches the criteria of the source host and is recommended to not be done during peak production hours. If you want to play it more safe and/or have differences between the hosts that would not let you do a live vmotion the recommendation is to turn off the VM by shutting down the server from the CVOS CLI with utils system shutdown and then move the VM with vmotion. This is often refereed to as a cold move.

[ln33147]

Thanks Roger, for the coming 2 projects the customers do not have vCenter so vMotion would not be an option, but I will take your recommendation into consideration when applicable. 

[Roger Kallberg]

If you do not have vCenter you can copy the entire folder where the VM files currently reside and copy it across to the new host/storage. Then the part to add it would comply of steps that I'm not all that familiar with as I always use vCenter, but you can likely figure it out without to much effort.

[Nithin Eluvathingal]

Same version is not supported  with PCD, but migrating to a different version i have done more than 15 cluster and never faced challenges.

I never done the migrations using Vmware.