We currently have a relatively small ESXi cluster (5.0.0 1489271) that is using a dedicated vCenter install (5.0.0 1300600) and an associated vCD instance (vCD 5.1.2.1068441). Our goal is to relocate the virtual machines running in this setup to our standard ESXi clusters (5.5.0 1892794) supported by a different vCenter install (5.5.0 1891313).
The vCD instance appears to add some additional parameters at the VM level that prevents the VM from being easily migrated out of the vCD instance. What we are looking for is a way to easily migrate these servers over and completely remove vCD from the equation. The only details around this we have found involve downtime for the VM and exports out of vCD which can be extended to due the total disk amount at the VM level, and we really do not think it is an option to get a window of downtime long enough to work through that process.
Has anyone gone down this path before? We have about 120 VMs in the vCD cluster using roughly 52 TB of disk.
Maybe we are misunderstanding something fundamental about the nature of migrating VMs out of the vCD instance, but we have not been able to find much detail about what options exist to make this move. We have talked with VMware support multiple times regarding this. They have mentioned a potential tool in the works within engineering to migrate from vCD to vCAC (which doesn't really fall within scope of our goal, unless vCAC would then provide a clear path to return the VMs to a standard ESXi cluster).
Any suggestions or ideas are much appreciated.