ISE VM move to another ESXi host

[Madura Malwatte]

Just wanted to confirm whether this is possible without breaking ISE. Our existing ESXi hosts are being decommissioned and we have ISE nodes there (PAN, SAN, MnTs). We need to move all these VM's to brand new ESXi hosts. Can I do the following:

- power off the SAN, make a copy of the SAN VM and transfer copy to new host

- power on SAN in new host

- promote SAN to Primary

- power off PAN (on old host), copy and transfer to new host

- power on PAN in new host

- promote PAN to primary 

- repeat for MnT nodes

This will save me from deploying brand new ise nodes, restoring ISE config and ops backup, transfering certs, de-register and registering all the ISE nodes etc...

Also I don't work with vmware much, is there a feature to create a backup of a vm? or do I have to copy the vm files manually?

[Mohammed al Baqari]

Not sure what you mean by take copy of san node. If you mean a snapshot,
then it won't work. Snapshots of ISE VMs will bot work.

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[Damien Miller]

Ask the VMware admin if they can storage vMotion the VMs. That will make life much easier since VMware will handle the actual move.  Your process will work though, however I would avoid swapping the node roles during the move, I would prefer to just move and power back on with a shorter outage. Make sure you have the required vlans on the other side/new hosts. 

If the VMware admin can't storage vMotion the VMs for you, then there are a couple others ways you can move the VM's. First is the traditional manual download of the VM from the datastore, works but make sure you take all the files. The other is to use something like Veeam, the free version will export and import a VM for you with ease.

Last but certainly not least, make sure the VM you are moving is powered off before you do anything. But it looks like you have this covered in your process.