Migrate DCE from 7.3.1 to 8.1.0

[UKHC_JDilday]

I currently have a DCE 7.3.1 Appliance with 125 sensors. we are wanting to switch to a DCE 8.1.0 VM. what would be the most efficient way to migrate the configuration and sensors to the new VM? Flying by the seat of my pants here, just got this thrown at me to figure out. any assistance would be greatly appreciated. 

[spezialist · Accepted solution]

Dear @UKHC_JDilday,

In your case, the upgrade process will be long and probably not simple, and there is no one most efficient solution here. I always say in such a case, if you don't need historical metrics data for your 125 sensors, the quickest thing to do is to simply deploy a fresh instance of the DCE-8.1.1 VM. And then re-deploy all of your 125 sensors and perform the additional customizations you had in the DCE 7.3.1 Appliance.
Otherwise, in the opposite case, you will have to go through a long process of sequentially upgrading your DCE 7.3.1 Appliance to DCE 7.8.1 Appliance, then converting to DCE 7.9.0 VM and then sequentially upgrading again to the latest DCE 8.1.1 VM. There are some good articles on this, e.g. DCE update path, Complete update process for DCE, Complete upgrade process for DCE 7.9.0 in section DCE downloads.

In any case, if all this is very complicated for you, you can always contact the local support team for expert help.

I hope this will help you.

[Gabi]

Hello,

if you want configuration&logs, the only known way is to upgrade your actual 7.3.1 to 7.4

0, 7.4.1, 7.4.2, 7.4.3, 7.5.0, 7.6.0, 7.7.0, 7.7.1, 7.8.0, 7.8.1 reinstall 7.9.0 as VM(if your appliance is very old, is possible to not be supported) and continue with 7.9.1, 7.9.2, 7.9.3, 8.0.0, 8.1.1

since will take a while because it is also recommended to backup before any upgrade and if is possible to delete older data(on backup logs are small files and take hours for some gigabytes of data)

from my point of view you have two options

1) cutover migration leaving appliance as it is and start configure new DCE from VM 8.1.1(keep appliance a while for older logs if you need)

2) on this way you must follow the classic way with upgrade taking every version....you can in the first place to delete older data in order to work faster between versions and also switch to VM from actual version(you must contact support to provide the oldest VM) and reduce the time by using snapshots option of VMware instead a classic smb/nfs full backup 

[spezialist]

Dear @UKHC_JDilday,

Another important article that you will definitely need, and which is not mentioned above -- is Migrating a Data Center Expert hardware server to a virtual appliance.

I hope this will help you.