Moving VMs from Xenserver8.2 to 7.6

[Harald Lipke]

I had moved some VMs from XS7.6 to a new Pool running 8.2.

 

Now we have to upgrade the new pool with additional disks and want to change from raid1 to raid5. So I would like to move back these VMs to the 7.6 pool. I cannot select the old pool as a destination in Xencenter - it is greyed out saying: "Older than current server".

 

I tried to employ the force option then via command line, but still get a refusal ...

 

xe vm-migrate remote-master=<IP of Master>  remote-username=root remote-password=<some-password> uuid=532ca9a1-2d92-3962-9045-20765cbcb3a6 --force

This is what I get - still refusing due to target pool being too old...

 

Performing a Storage XenMotion migration. Your VM's VDIs will be migrated with the VM.
Will migrate to remote host: Hostname, using remote network: xy. Here is the VDI mapping:
VDI 4191785e-8899-45f5-bc38-2d0133af7968 -> SR 1658140a-cf11-df28-bdf0-37bd50f1b71c

Cannot migrate a VM to a destination host which is older than the source host.

 

host: 532ca9a1-2d92-3962-9045-20765cbcb3a6 (VmName)
vm: OpaqueRef:dc4ac698-3622-9d9d-4f15-c916b62e7546

 

Any ideas what I could try to move the VMs to the old pool?

 

---

I tried to go via export/import to VDA file but receive error log: "Import Appliance: Specified cast is not valid"

 

[Tobias Kreidl]

You can only migrate from a release to another same release or newer release. You cannot migrate from a release to an older release.

To move VMs, you will have to export and import them and possibly redo XenTools.

 

-=Tobias

[Alan Lantz]

Yep, you can go forward, but you can't go backwards.

 

--Alan--

 

[Harald Lipke]

Hi Tobias, Alan,

 

thank you for your answers! Would have been nice to be able to go back (and I guess there might be a trick but I could not find anything in google...) but the VMs are not crucial for PROD - so I parked them switched off on one of the other 8.2 hosts until after we will have done the raid update...

 

Harald

[Tobias Kreidl]

Harald,

You should be able to export the VMs and import them back onto your older XenServer. Unfortunately, this will require some downtime.

Again, you may need to re-install a matching version of XenTools. If you didn't change that on your VMs on your newer server, there should not be any action required once they are imported back onto the older XS.

 

-=Tobias

[Olivier Lambert]

You can "cheat" and use Xen Orchestra to do this :) Eg with VM copy or continuous replication!