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Upgrade VMWARE from 4.1 to 5.5

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Hello ,

we are planning the upgrade of our vmware infrastructure from v.4.1 to v.5.5

Actually we have Acronis for Vmware v.9 running on the 4.1 vmware.

How can we proceed to the upgrade, preserving the backups made by Acronis?

Let me explain:
we are doing the upgrade "manually", creating new VC and then moving/upgrading the hosts one by one from the old infrastrucure to the new.
Now I have 1 host 5.5 in a new VC 5.5, the other hosts are still in the old VC 4.1 , for testing purpose I've tried to move a single VM from old VC to new VC.
When I remove a VM from the old inventory, Acronis removes it from the backup job...

We would like to avoid "restart from scratch" of all the backups... is it possible?

Thanks,
Bruno

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi Bruno,

After the hosts upgrade the InstanceUUID property of the VMs may change in the vSphere infrastructure and thus your existing backup tasks won't be able to discover the VMs using the InstanceUUID IDs recorded inside the task script. As the result you may have a half-empty task which won't preserve the VM selection (from the 1st step of the backup wizard). The solution in this case would be to edit the backup task and re-select the VMs on 1st step of the wizard. Note that you won't need to make any additional changes to the backup task - all other settings will be preserved.

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis Virtualization Program Manager

Hi Vasily,
thank you very much for your fast response, I've made some tests today and I confirm that the backup files are handled correctly by the appliance on the new vcenter.
Please note that we're performing upgrade with a new vcenter, disconnecting VM from the old one and re-connecting them to the new one.
Obviously both vcenter have access to the SANs where VMs are allocated.
When I re-connect the VM to the new inventory, selecting "I MOVED IT" on the answer at start time, the UUID does not change, so the new Acronis appliance is able to handle the existing recovery point in the backup file, also to remove old recovery points.
When I will do the migration in production, I can't migrate all at once, but there will be, in the middle, some time where some VM are still on the old VC and some others are on the new, so I MUST redefine the backup tasks on the new appliance... or can I import jobs from the old to the new appliance?
Can I import the jobs from one appliance to the other? Also if the Vcenter name/ip are different?

Best regards,
Bruno

frestogaslorastaswastavewroviwroclolacorashibushurutraciwrubrishabenichikucrijorejenufrilomuwrigaslowrikejawrachosleratiswurelaseriprouobrunoviswosuthitribrepakotritopislivadrauibretisetewrapenuwrapi
Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi Bruno,

You can migrate the configuration from the old appliance to new one (Configure->Agent Settings->Export/Import) and the tasks will be preserved. Note that in case the vCenter is inaccessible using the old hostname/IP recorded in the migrated configuration then configuration will be imported partially (the activity will be marked as failed), however the backup tasks will still be migrated properly - you will only have to register the new host/vCenter on the new appliance.

The general rule is: As long as the InstanceUUID property of the host/vCenter/VMs is not changed the backup tasks won't "lose" the VMs even if the host changes IP address or login credentials (which you can adjust under Configure->ESXi hosts).

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis Virtualization Program Manager