Moving esxi 5.5 installation to new hardware

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carolina_guy

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Feb 16, 2014
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I have an existing esxi 5.5 setup that I'm moving to all new hardware (motherboard, ram, etc). All my VMs are on a physical disk so they will be easy to move.

What I'm curious about is how to move the host config - should I simply slap the USB drive into the new MB and boot or will that fail? There is a config export from the command line, but I'm not sure if that will hose up my config on the new hardware if driver info is included.

So question is - what is the best practice when wanting to preserve settings (network, IPs, etc) when moving an esxi host to all new hardware?

Note the two hosts won't be up and running at the same time.

thanks!
 
Only takes a few minutes to reinstall and configure ESXi. I'd just do that.
 
I agree with Jason, just do a fresh install on the new ESXi host.
 
If you have your heart set against re-configuring the host, you can always use the vicfg-cfgbackup command to backup the host settings, reinstall ESXi on new hardware, then use vicfg-cfgbackup to restore.

But more than likely by the time you figure out the command and use it, it would have taken the same amount of time to rebuild the host.
 
Child of Wonder said:
If you have your heart set against re-configuring the host, you can always use the vicfg-cfgbackup command to backup the host settings, reinstall ESXi on new hardware, then use vicfg-cfgbackup to restore.

But more than likely by the time you figure out the command and use it, it would have taken the same amount of time to rebuild the host.
Click to expand...

And get your NICs re-ordered and reconfigured....
 
NetJunkie said:
And get your NICs re-ordered and reconfigured....
Click to expand...

Not if you reinstall ESXi on the new hardware first to enumerate the new network adapters, as I suggested. The vicfg-cfgbackup backup file will simply create the vSwitches and IPs on top of the new vmnics. But it would also require that the network adapters be ordered on the new hardware correctly or vmnic3 and 4 on the old host may have been connected to iSCSI ports, but now they're different NICs on the new host.

vicfg-cfgbackup could work, but, like I said, once you factor in the time to use it and address any issues, you may as well have just reconfigured from scratch. Not like just reconfiguring the host would take long. If OP is worried about it, invest some time in learning how to script the process and use that method going forward.

Giving options. :)
 
Last edited:
Sure. But you're assuming I want the restore to do that and it'll do it in the order I want. :)
 
NetJunkie said:
Sure. But you're assuming I want the restore to do that and it'll do it in the order I want. :)
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's what I thought of after my last post and then edited it. :D

The old host may have had 2 onboard Gb NICs and 2 PCI-E 1Gb NICs while the new host has 4 onboard 1Gb NICs and 2 PCI-E 10Gb NICs. :p If OP was re-using the NICs from the old host in the new one, then it'd have a good shot of working but the 5 minutes to reconfigure the host will work 100% of the time.
 
The vpower cli backup and restore works perfectly in my experience so I'd definitely try that before doing a reconfig by hand.
 
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