How to migrate a VM from ESXI 5.5 to ESXI 7.0 (OVF Tool)
At the moment I am trying to disband an old VSphere environment (ESXI 5.5) and upgrade to VSphere 7.0.
Unfortunately, the easiest migration approach using the migration function in VCenter does not work in this case, as an ESXI 5.5 can no longer be integrated in the latest VCenter version.
Instead, the small command line tool OVF (Open Virtualization Format) is used.
VMware provides the following information about the tool.
"VMware OVF Tool is a command-line utility that allows you to import and export OVF packages to and from many VMware products."
This means that we can use the tool to copy VMs from two incompatible VSphere environments.
The advantage of this is that you do not have to take an intermediate step and the VMs can be moved directly between the ESXI nodes..
Downloadlink:
https://code.vmware.com/web/tool/4.4.0/ovf
Usage - Example:
# 1 - Launch CMD
# 2 - Change to the right directory
cd "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool"
# 3 - Starting the migration
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool.exe -ds=<datastore> vi://root@<ip-host1>/<VM-Name> vi://root@<ip-host2>
Sources: