vCenter Server 5 Data Migration Tool compatibility issues

While preparing for vSphere 5: What’s New training delivery I found out that vCenter Server Data Migration Tool on vCenter Server 5 installation media is not quite compatible with vCenter Server 4.1 contrary to documentation. vCenter Server Data Migration Tools is set of scripts for exporting and importing vCenter Server configuration and it is useful if you are migrating vCenter Server to a new operating system (32-bit to 64-bit migration for example).

Data Migration Tool can be used to back up vCenter Server settings such as:

• LDAP data
• vCenter Services port settings (HTTP, HTTPS, Web services, etc)
• SSL certificates
• Licenses

Data Migration Tool is available on vCenter Server installation media in “datamigration” folder.

First snag I hit was that for some weird reason Windows 2008 R2 built in unzip feature was not able to successfully extract datamigration.zip, most of the files in the archive were never extracted. I installed IZArc (which is a great freeware archive tool btw) to my test vCenter Server and it extracted all files successfully.

Once Data Migration Tool fully extracted I went on to do a backup of my vCenter Server configuration running backup.bat in the Data Migration Tool installation folder. I was greeted with a message that my vCenter Server 4.1 Update 2 installation does not satisfy migration prerequisite…

Even though I was asked to continue backup with “Y” backup eventually failed with error. I then went on to VMware KB to lookup Data Migration Tool solutions entry and found KB article 2005328, in that article it clearly reads that “vCenter Server 4.x and its update releases” are supported.

I started up going through Data Migration Tool scripts and found out that compatibility issue is very easy to fix. There is set of Python scripts for vCenter Server, Update Manager and vCenter Orchestrator services and you need to edit backup script for each of the service to successfully back up data from vCenter 4.1.

First open vCenter Orchestrator backup script, on my installation it was located in C:\datamigration\vco\vcobackup.py, open this file in text editor, such as notepad. In the beginning of the script there is regex entry to check software version

# supported VMware vCenter Orchestrator versions regex
supported_vco_version_regex =’4\.0\.[0-9]+’

replace regex with following entry and save file

# supported VMware vCenter Orchestrator versions regex
supported_vco_version_regex =’4\.[0-9]+’

Next proceed to edit vCenter Server backup script C:\datamigration\vpx\vcenterbackup.py and search for entry

# supported vSphere versions regex
supported_vc_ver_regex =’2\.5\.+|4\.0\.+’

replace regex with following entry and save file

# supported vSphere versions regex
supported_vc_ver_regex =’2\.5\.+|4\.+’

Finally proceed to edit Update Manager backup script C:\datamigration\vum\vumbackup.py and search for entry

# supported VMware vSphere Update Manager versions regex
supported_vum_ver_regex =’1\.0\.+|4\.0\.+’

replace regex with following entry and save file

# supported VMware vSphere Update Manager versions regex
supported_vum_ver_regex =’1\.0\.+|4\.+’

Now running the backup.bat against vCenter Server 4.1 will succeed

Data Migration Tool saves configuration in data folder of your Data Migration Tool installation folder, you can then copy that folder to a Data Migration Tool installation folder on a new server and run install.bat to restore configuration to a new vCenter Server instance.

See VMware KB article 2005328 for detailed instructions of Data Migration Tool backup and restore process.