Migrating VMs from ESX4 to ESX5
One of my customers asked me to help them migrate their VMs from an ESX 4 environment into a brand new ESX 5 environment. This new environment had brand new servers and storage (as well as fibre switches); they needed a forklift. We discussed migration strategies (presenting some shared storage to both environments, etc.) but, due to a long list of very environment specific considerations, we determined that cold migrations during outage windows would be the best solution. As such, there was a fair amount of hands on work that would be required. Given that a large amount of the work would need to be done after hours, automation became a high priority. To that end, I put together a PowerCLI script that the migration team could use to perform these migrations. This script is designed to be used by an administrator who can babysit the process, for it spits out its status updates and end results so that the administrator can validate the important settings. ...