Cisco Expressway ESXi Host Migration Support

[Anas Hafez]

We need to migrate Cisco Expressway Version 12.7 from an ESXi host to another

I want to confirm if i can use cold migration (which if i understand correctly doesn't involve vMotion in anyway and we need vCenter for it) which needs the VM to be powered off first, it should be supported as stated in the virtualization docwiki

However after referring to the installation guide i found the below statement which left me somehow confused, does that mean i can't use cold migration

 would appreciate if someone could shed some light regarding those 2 points

Thanks in Advance,

[Roger Kallberg]

Can you please describe in as much details as you possibly can what you mean by cold migration?

AFAIK moving a VM from one host to another always implies use of vmotion, regardless of operational state of the VM. The exception to this would be if you manually go into the file storage of the VM system and move the actual files for the VM to another host.

[Anas Hafez]

Thanks Roger,

I think the misconception i'm having here is due to incorrect understanding if what every migration syntax mean,

What i mean by cold migration (this understanding could of-course be completely wrong) is shutting down the VM then using vCenter to migrate the VM from one ESXi host to another then powering itback again, if this is incorrect then please by all means let me know.

What i mean by vMotion is migrating a running VM from one ESXi host to another using vCenter, the reason i have this understanding is that in the VMware vMotion definition i didn't find anything saying it's used to migrate shutdown VMs and always involves live migration (migrating a running VM), if you have another reference saying otherwise please let me know.

[Roger Kallberg]

Your welcome @Anas Hafez 

Both of these uses vmotion. There is a misconception in the Cisco documentation that move of a powered down VM would not use vmotion. The difference is that in the powered off state there would be no disruption to active traffic as there would be none. For Expressway you can pretty much achieve the very same thing with first putting it in maintenance mode and wait for all calls to clear before you move the VM.