Nutanix Move 3.5 was recently released and with that came a feature that was requested by a lot of our customers, in fact, it was a feature I asked for when I was involved in the beta testing of the Hyper-V to AHVcapability of Move. So what kind of migrations support the test migration feature and what are the requirements for using it?
The test migration feature is supported on all migration plans except AHV to AWS. So if you are moving from Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESXI, or Amazon AWS EC2 onto AHV/ESXi on Nutanix you will have the ability to test your migration before you do the final cutover. This will allow you to see if the server boots correctly and verify that everything is copied successfully when you do the final migration.
Test Migration Requirements
The only requirement to use the test migration feature is that you have another network (VLAN) setup on your Nutanix cluster that is separate from the one you plan to deploy the VM after the final migration. I would strongly suggest that the VLAN you set up for your test migrations is isolated from your production environment. The servers are fully functional and you would not want them to interfere with the production server that is still running or interacting with any other production resources while you are testing. This network does not need to be routable, and you could just create it on the Nutanix cluster without setting it up on your network switches. Then use the remote console in Prism or vSphere to check out the VM. Of course, if you already have an isolated testing network setup in your network topology you would just then need to set it up in Nutanix Prism, or in vSphere console.
Migration Plan Set-up
So assuming you have already set up a test network in Prism or the vSphere. Setting up a migration plan is pretty straightforward. I would like to point out that in Move 3.5 there are no separate source and target environments that need to be set up, they are all just environments. Source and target environments are chosen based on supported migration scenarios.
Migration plans are the same, you select your source and target, select your VM’s, and on the network configuration screen, you have the option to choose a Test Network. The test network dropdown becomes selectable once you select your target network. This ensures you are unable to select the same network for both target and test networks.
After that is done, everything else is the same, so finish up VM preparation and save and start your migration plan. Starting a migration plan just starts the data copy, you still have complete control on when you do the cutover or testing.
When the migration plan shows ready to cutover, you can see this by hovering over the in progress under the status section on the move main page.
Click on In Progress under status to bring up the Migration screen. You should see a new option called test actions.
Select the VM you want to test and chose Create Test VM.
You should see this screen below:
Click continue if you want to create the test VM. The important part to remember is that the Source VM will not be altered in any way, unlike in a move cutover where the source VM is powered off and the nic is disabled.
Once you click continue, you will see information about the process on the details tab.
When the test VM is ready you will see View Test VM under migration status.
Clicking on View Test VM will open Prism Element on the cluster where the VM will be migrated.
Check the test VM
You can then check the test VM to make sure it booted correctly and all data has been copied.
From here you have two choices for the test VM. If the VM had an issue that you fixed, you can choose to recreate the test VM, which will delete the current test VM and create a new one. Or if you were satisfied with the test, you can choose to remove the test VM.
If you choose to do the cutover, the cutover process will delete the test VM as part of the process of the cutover if you have not removed it already.
Thank you for reading about the test Migration featured added in Move 3.5. This feature should help you better plan your migrations, as you can see how long the cutover will take, as well as allowing you to check on the integrity of your VM before doing the real impacting migration. You can find out more about Nutanix Move here and the release notes for move 3.5 are located on the Nutanix Support Portal.
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