As you may or may not know, the new vCen­ter 4.1 requires that the host it runs on is 64 bit. As 4.0 and pre­vi­ous ver­sions weren’t sup­ported on 64 bit at all, this prob­a­bly means that when you upgrade you will need to move your exist­ing data­base to a new host.

There are sev­eral ways of doing the migra­tion, but one way is to backup your exist­ing data­base, and restore it on a new host and point the new vCen­ter 4.1 instal­la­tion to the exist­ing data­base and have it upgrade it for you dur­ing install.

I’m sure that you would like to auto­mate that process, just to limit the pos­si­bil­ity of man­ual screw ups, right? Thank­fully, VMware had the same idea.

In chap­ter 5 of the vSphere Upgrade Guide, VMware out­lines the dif­fer­ent meth­ods you can use when migrat­ing your vCen­ter data­base, and on page 39 a data migra­tion tool makes it’s appearance.

This two step process takes a backup of your exist­ing vCen­ter SQL Server Express data­base and dumps it to a pre­de­fined local folder. You then copy the entire migra­tion tool folder to the new host and run the sec­ond part of the tool to install vCen­ter 4.1 and import the old database.

I used this tool to migrate our setup, from Win­dows Server 2003 32bit to Win­dows Server 2008 R2 64bit with­out problems.

The only thing you need to be aware of is that VMware Update Man­ager is still a 32bit appli­ca­tion and requires that you man­u­ally cre­ate a 32bit DSN to the data­base. This is men­tioned in the VUM Instal­la­tion and Admin­is­tra­tion Guide, but it is not men­tioned in the vSphere Upgrade Guide.

All in all, this tool is a great assis­tant for all of you that need to migrate to a new host for 64bit sup­port in vCen­ter Server 4.1. While it could be more pol­ished, brand a GUI and let you use net­work stor­age for the back­ups, it does the job at hand very well. After all, who needs a pol­ished GUI based appli­ca­tion for a one off job like this?

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Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EVRY ASA, specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.