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Hello everyone,

I am looking for advice on how to manage a migration from a VMWare host to a Hyper-V host while maintaining backups continuity under Veeam B&R 12.2 with only 2 sockets licensed.

 

Background

We have decided to move from VMWare to Hyper-V.  Our environment is small and it makes solid economic sense over the lifetime of the current Windows Server edition.  The Windows Server licensing was bought before Veeam expanded support to other hypervisors, so Proxmox VE was not in scope for this move.  

We have timed our migration to coincide with a hardware refresh, so we will move from a two-host ESXi setup (VMWare VSphere Essentials with Veeam managing replication to the second host) to a two-host Hyper-V setup.  Again, we intend to use Veeam to manage replication because Windows Server Hyper-V Replication is constrictive compared to the options we have under Veeam, for our risk profile.

There are 18 VMs in scope for the move.  The bulk of the data is approximately 50TB of data from our digital repository of the museum items.

We are on Veeam B&R 12.2, with a 2 socket perpetual license and over a year left in support.  We have enough space in our backup repositories to accommodate the backups for this new environment, but we still need to be able to access the data from the old backups.  

 

Proposal

I am looking for advice on how to best manage our licensing so that we do not have an interruption in backups.  My intention is:

  • Rebuild anything that can be rebuilt easily on the new infrastructure e.g. DCs, file servers,  digital repo data etc. replicating with rsync and robocopy from the old environment to the new until cutover.
  • Use Instant Recovery if available under our licensing to migrate the remainder of the VMs, otherwise use another V2V solution.
  • Migrate our Veeam license to the new host and set up new backups.  After an appropriate period, the ESXi machines will be fully decommissioned.

At the end of this, we will be back at a single host covered by our 2 socket license, replicating to a second host.

I fully expect that there will be some unexpected roadblocks so I would welcome any insights. 

 

With thanks,

Simon

Hi Simon..welcome to the Community. I haven’t migrated to a new hypervisor myself as of yet, but certainly contemplating it in the coming months or so with what Broadcom has done 😕 As far as your Veeam licensing goes, and you really need to verify this with your local account rep and/or Support, but while in transition, you should be able to use your current license on both environments for the migration process. I don’t believe you’ll be out of scope there, but again verify with your local Rep.

As far as the actual migration is concerned, I think you hit the nail right on the head...build up a new Veeam Server if that’s what you wanna do, perform a DB migration to the new server, or not...really up to you since you have such a small environment. Probably best to start from a greenfield build. Then yes..do an Instant Recovery of your current VMware VMs to Hyper-V.

Maybe someone else can chime in with other things to look out for, but those are my initial recommendations.

Best.

I can’t speak to the socket license but the plan is on point. I just converted an environment to phy. Veeam servers and migrated ESXi VMs to Hyper via Veeam for a customer. It was all fairly painless with config & DB restores to new gear. 

Thanks everyone.

I was not planning on reinstalling Veeam - it sits on its own hardware.  However, it may be for the best if it means I can gracefully migrate its attention and licensing to the new environment.

Regards,

Simon

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