Migrating a datacenter with PowerCLI – Introduction

For the last few months, I have been working on a project to migrate 1000 virtual machines from one datacentre to another datacentre. Both datacentres are 50KM in distance from each other. The building where the source datacentre is situated, will be stripped and will be rebuild conform current standards.
This means that every window, door, wall and all cables will be removed.
You can imagine that moving all the physical hardware (3 blades chassis, 42u of storage hardware and physical switches) and virtual machine from one datacentre to another datacentre is a huge operation. Because the virtual machine hosted in this datacentre are running production workloads, user impact should be minimal, and if user impact is expected, and migrations should be done during maintenance windows.
Both datacentres have their own vCenter servers (6.0), multiple vSphere (6.0) clusters and storage (Fiber Channel), and are connected at L2 level. The vCenter servers are members of the same SSO domain.[expand title=”Read more…”]
Because of this, I can use long distance vMotion to move the virtual machines from one datacentre to the other datacentre.
Of course, this can be done, using the vSphere web Client, but because of the number of virtual machines, we decided to write a Powershell script, that will do the job for us.
This script is scheduled to run during maintenance hours, and will read text file (batchXX.txt) to determine which virtual machines should be migrated.

In this blog series, I will explain the PowerCLI script I created, step by step, and eventually, how the migration went.

Table of content
Introduction
Chapter 1: Log function
Chapter 2: Notifications
Chapter 3: Reading VM attributes
Chapter 4: Storage space
Chapter 5: Move-vm
Chapter 6: Testing
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