Migration of VM's & Datasets

[tripodal]

I have several systems and recently manually migrated via replication from on Scale system to another.

Does anyone have a more streamlined way for moving a VM?
The process i used was :

-setup replication
-stop vm
-wait for snap to replicate
-stop replication
-recreate vm manually
-attach disks
-boot

It takes 6-12hours to transfer the data, so i wanted this to happen with as little downtime as possible.

 

[sretalla]

How is the data changing? if there aren't many changes (or no important ones), you could do the replication while the OLD VM is still running.

Or replicate first, then stop, take another snapshot and replicate that (just the last changes), then complete the migration.

 

[tripodal]

Rate of change is relatively low, its just many TB's over the wire for that initial sync.

I'm rebuilding the original host and so I need the workload up while I rebuild the hardware / vdevs etc.

So I've managed to move things manually the first time; and am looking to see if anyone has a simpler way.