Before starting the process that will allow you to migrate all of your virtual machines to your new Nutanix AHV environment, a quick overview of the prerequisites is required.

General prerequisites

In terms of general prerequisites, there are a few things to respect and check before starting the migration of your infrastructure.

You can migrate everything, with 2 exceptions

The first thing to know is the types of machines to migrate. You can migrate all of your virtual machines with Nutanix Move, except:

• domain controllers
• Exchange servers

These are the only 2 restrictions of the software. It is recommended to install a new domain controller, migrate the FSMO roles to it, promote it to a primary domain controller and depromote the old one. Regarding Exchange, you will have to reinstall a server and transfer all of the data from the old server.

Network Flows

Obviously, since we are talking about a migration via the network, it is imperative that the flows are open to allow Nutanix Move to reach the source and destination clusters:

An upcoming update of my flow matrix is ​​planned to integrate the Move part.

Administrator account with privilege

For Nutanix Move to perform the operations required for migrations on the different source and destination clusters, it is imperative to have accounts with administrator rights on these clusters.

Prerequisites specific to VMware ESXi clusters

Supported operating systems

To date, the majority of operating systems used in a professional environment on ESXi are supported by Move.

You can find the supported operating systems for a migration from ESXi directly in the official documentation: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Move-v5_4:top-migration-considerations-c.html

If one of your virtual machines is not compatible for a Nutanix Move migration (I invite you to carry out tests, unsupported does not mean non-functional), you will then have to consider carrying out a complete and up-to-date reinstallation on the new cluster.

VMware Tools

It is important that VMware tools are deployed on all of your virtual machines so that Nutanix Move can manage the virtual machines hosted on the source ESXi cluster optimally. This will avoid warnings or failures when you launch the migration processes.

All ESXi prerequisites are available here: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Move-v5_4:top-migration-considerations-c.html

Specific prerequisites for Microsoft Hyper-V clusters

Supported operating systems

To date, the majority of operating systems used in a professional environment on Hyper-V are supported by Move.

You can find the operating systems supported by Move for a migration from Hyper-V directly in the official documentation: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Move-v5_4:top-hyperv-vm-migration-c.html

If one of your virtual machines is not compatible for a Nutanix Move migration (I invite you to carry out tests, not supported does not mean non-functional), you will then have to consider carrying out a complete and up-to-date reinstallation on the new cluster.

Nutanix Move Agent

On the Hyper-V cluster, for this to work, it will be imperative to deploy the Nutanix Move Agent. I will detail the agent installation procedure in the following articles.

It’s here in the official documentation: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Move-v5_4:top-deploy-nt-service-t.html

All the Hyper-V prerequisites are here: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Move-v5_4:top-migration-considerations-hyperv-ahv-c.html

Linux Azure

For Linux VMs, you also need to install an add-on on each of them using the following command:

sudo apt install linux-azure

Linux Azure is a kind of VMware tools for Hyper-V and reserved for Linux machines.

In the next blog post, we will deploy the Move machine on our Nutanix AHV cluster.