I noticed a question today on one of our internal social platforms, the question was if you can move a vSAN Stretched Cluster to a different vCenter Server. I can be short, I tested it and the answer is yes! How do you do it? Well, we have a great KB that actually documents the process for a normal vSAN Cluster and the same applies to a stretched cluster. When you add the hosts to your new vCenter Server and into your newly created cluster it will pull in the fault domain details (stretched cluster configuration details) from the hosts itself, so when you go to the UI the Fault Domains will pop up again, as shown in the screenshot below.
What did I do? Well in short, but please use the KB for the exact steps:
- Powered off all VMs
- Placed the hosts into maintenance mode (do not forget about the Witness!)
- Disconnected all hosts from the old vCenter Server, again, do not forget about the witness
- Removed the hosts from the inventory
- Connected the Witness to the new vCenter Server
- Created a new Cluster object on the new vCenter Server
- Added the stretched cluster hosts to the new cluster on the new vCenter Server
- Took the Witness out of Maintenance Mode first
- Took the other hosts out of maintenance
That was it, pretty straight forward. Of course, you will need to make sure you have the storage policies in both locations, and you will also need to do some extra work if you use a VDS. Nevertheless, it works pretty much straight-forward and as you would expect it to work!
Thank you the god information
Great to hear this is an easy process. Well, it looks easy but one needs to be very familiar with the VDS to do the task.