Within the vSphere world we have currently one goal regarding our vCenter. Migrate it from a Windows based installation to the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA).
The doing of this migration is pretty straight forward and works pretty well (e.g. here). But since we will shutdown the original vCenter VM based on Windows afterwards we need to make sure how to deal with applications that were running besides the vCenter.
We need to migrate them as well. Especially in case of the Horizon View Composer we need to do some proper planning, otherwise our linked-clones (which require the composer) cannot be created and maintained anymore (refresh, rebalance, recompose (R-R-R) operations).
Doing that migration is quite straight-forward. But we need to do some specific and not very well known tasks before we can do all of the steps.
Goal: Migrate the vCenter to the vCSA and get rid of all currently used Oracle Databases within the VMware vSphere & Horizon environment.
- Define a Maintenance windows and make sure no further Horizon View maintenance operations takes place (R-R-R).
- Backup the Horizon Composer Database with the included View backup mechanism.
- Create Windows Server for the Composer (compvm)
- Create a Database for the Composer and the corresponding ODBC connection.
- Restore the Backup on the compvm
- Repoint Horizon within the View Admin to the new Composer
- Test Maintenance Operations
- Clean up old databases.