Notre appliance Nutanix Move est déployée, les clusters sources fonctionnant sous VMware ESXi et Microsoft Hyper-V and the target cluster running under Nutanix AHV have been added. The next step is to create the migration plans for our virtual machines.

Prerequisites

For everything to go well, some prerequisites must be taken into account, but the main ones are as follows:

• VMware Tools deployed and up to date on all virtual machines
• Supported operating systems

All prerequisites on official documentation: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Move-v5_4:top-esxi-vm-migration-c.html

Creation of the migration plan from VMware ESXi to Nutanix AHV

On the Nutanix Move interface, click on the “+ New Migration Plan” button and name the migration plan:

On the next screen, you must choose the source cluster on the one hand, then the destination cluster with the associated Storage Container:

In our case, this gives:

• 1 – ESXi Cluster
• 2 – Nutanix Cluster
• 3 – DefaultStorangeContainer

Obviously, you will have to adapt the selected information to your environment. Depending on the type of server to migrate, you will have to choose the destination Storage Container wisely to adapt the data optimization mechanisms to the workloads you are migrating.

On the next screen, it is time to choose the machines virtuelles que vous souhaitez migrer en cliquant sur les boutons “+” en début de ligne :

In my case, I chose to select the Ubuntu_4 and Windows_4 virtual machines. A small Warning appears on the Windows machine because UEFI is only supported from AOS 5.16. My cluster being in 6.8.1, this will not be a problem.

On the next screen, it is the network mapping that must be done. For each network available on your ESXi cluster, you will have to assign a network from your Nutanix cluster:

Here, I have only one network in my demo environment. If you have multiple networks on the ESXi side, you will need to create them all on the AHV side in order to achieve an identical mapping on both sides.

The next window allows you to configure the preparation of virtual machines.

Automatic preparation of virtual machines

The recommended mode is the automatic mode because Nutanix Move will take care of all the operations once the machine login credentials are configured.

Please note that automatic mode only works on operating systems fully supported by Nutanix Move.

To check if your VMs’ operating systems are supported, I advise you to look in the official documentation: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Move-v4_7:top-migration-considerations-c.html

You will then need to configure the identifiers of the Windows and Linux virtual machines:

The general option is only valid if you have set the same username and password on all your virtual machines (example for Windows: the domain administrator account).

If this is not the case, you can customize all the settings per virtual machine by clicking on “Change settings” under “Override individual VM Preparation”:

Manual preparation of virtual machines

The overall configuration remains the same, but when configuring the virtual machine preparation mode if you choose Manual mode you will have a different page:

No need to provide login credentials to virtual machines. On the other hand, all the automated preparation part carried out by Nutanix Move on your virtual machines will have to be done manually on each machine.

Nutanix Move provides scripts for Linux and Windows servers that you will have to run manually. A much more time-consuming option and source of potential errors that make me systematically prefer the automatic mode.

However, this migration mode may sometimes be necessary, particularly to migrate virtual machines whose operating system is not officially supported by Nutanix Move.

Finalizing the migration plan

On the next screen, the configuration of the virtual machines allows you to prioritize or not the migration operations, to choose the time zone that you wish to assign or even to schedule the start of the data transfer:

Don’t panic, enabling data transfer does not mean that the machines will be migrated, simply the data of these machines will start to synchronize with the target cluster. This synchronization will continue as long as you do not trigger the migration.

Once your configurations are complete, Move will display a summary of your migration plan:

Click on “Save” to validate it, your migration plan is ready and you can find it on the Nutanix Move home page:

Other migration plans can be created in the same way.

Now that our Nutanix Move virtual machine is deployed, it is time to configure our first cluster to migrate: VMware ESXi.

Creating a Move account on ESXi

In order not to use the “root” account of my ESXi cluster and to respect good security practices, I preferred to create a user dedicated to Nutanix Move on my ESXi cluster.

Once connected to my cluster, on the host in “Manage”, go to “Security and users > Users”:

Click on “Add a user” and fill in the necessary fields:

Then, right-click on the host and click on “Permissions” then on “Add a user”:

Enter the name of the user previously created (in my case “move”) and assign him administration rights. Click on “Add a user”:

The service account dedicated to Nutanix Move is created, now let’s add the cluster on the Nutanix Move side.

Adding the ESXi cluster on Nutanix Move

To add an ESXi environment on Nutanix Move, you need to connect to the Move interface and click on the “+ Add Environment” button on the home page:

In the window that appears, you must:

• 1 – select the type of VMware ESXi environment
• 2 – name the environment that you are adding
• 3 – enter the IP address of the vCenter or the ESXi host if there is only one node
• 4 – enter the username and password of the service account created on ESXi

Click “Add” and wait while the cluster is added. If you followed all the steps, your cluster will appear in the list on the left of the Nutanix Move interface:

In my case, small Warning on the ESXi cluster since a library is missing (if you have followed the previous articles, this is linked to the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom which no longer makes these files freely accessible, use an earlier version of Nutanix Move to avoid this problem). If you are in the same case as me, click on “Upload VDDK”:

Then click on “Upload” at the end of the line corresponding to the version of the clusters you wish to migrate (you can upload several if you have several cluster versions) to transfer the file(s):

ATTENTION: you must have the VDDK files that you can find here (an active Broadcom customer account is required): https://developer.broadcom.com/sdks/vmware-virtual-disk-development-kit-vddk/latest

Once the addition of the VDDKs is complete, your ESXi source cluster is now operational:

Official documentation: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Move-v5_4:top-upload-vddk-library-t.html