Administration Guide › Provisioning Resources › Rapid Server Imaging › Migrate Servers with RSI

Migrate Servers with RSI

When CA Server Automation is integrated with an RSI Server, you can migrate server images directly from a physical or virtual machine to another physical or virtual machine. Optionally, you can migrate a server to a bare metal server or a new instance of a virtual machine.

Important! Before migrating Windows images, ensure that you capture drivers that are required for successful deployment of the image.

Follow these steps:

1. Click Resources, right-click the machine to capture from in the Explore tree, and select Provisioning, RSI Migration.

   The Perform Migration wizard opens in the Migrate Source panel.

2. Select the RSI Server and Depot to use, and optionally edit the Image Name.
3. Specify the Target MAC and OS Type of the machine to capture.
4. (Optional) Set a Description for the image, and a Profile URL of an external file containing capture parameters.
5. (Optional) Specify File Systems to Exclude from the image.
6. (Optional) Select Live Capture to perform an online capture of the running server. Disable Live Capture to shut down the server first, and capture an image after reboot.
7. (Optional) If multiple networks are registered and Live Capture is disabled, select the network to use for capture.
8. (Optional) Select Delete Image to delete the image from the depot after migration is complete.
9. Click Next.

   The Migrate Destination panel opens.

10. Select the Provision Type.
    • Select Default to deploy to an existing machine.
    • Select Bare Metal to provision to a new server or virtual machine that does not currently have a deployed RSI agent or operating system installed.
    • Select New VM to provision a new instance of a virtual machine to host the migrated server image.

      The VMware vCenter Provisioning wizard opens. Follow the procedure described in Add a Virtual Machine (vCenter Server), starting at step 2. Completing the wizard returns to the Migrate Destination panel.

      Note: New VM provisioning does not use VM templates. The disk and network configuration steps are not optional.

      Important! Specify the same datastore for all disks. If you create multiple disks with different datastores, new VM provisioning fails.

11. Select the RSI server to use for deployment.

    Note: If the RSI servers for capture and deploy are different, they must access the same depot.

12. Specify the Machine Type.
    • Specify the Target MAC for a Physical machine.
    • Specify the Hypervisor and Target System ID for a Virtual machine.
13. (Optional) Select Scale to deploy only the parts of the image containing data, and set a Profile URL of an external file containing deployment parameters.
14. (Windows Only) Select a Driver Set to deploy.

    Note: After you successfully deploy a Windows image, Windows runs chkdsk. The target system automatically restarts, then Windows runs PnP (plug-and-play) and installs drivers.

15. (Optional) Specify a Host Name to apply to the machine hosting the image and select Network Interfaces to use.

    Note: Setting a host name overrides the host name in the image or in a profile.

16. Click Finish.

    The wizard submits a request to migrate the image to the target machine. Track the progress of the migration in the Jobs pane.

    Note: For migration to a physical bare metal server which cannot be network booted using WakeOnLan from CA Server Automation, manual intervention may be required to reboot the server during migration.