Epic Goal

Investigate and document the technical feasibility, approaches, and limitations for migrating OpenShift clusters on vSphere between different vCenter
instances and datastores, focusing on VCF9 with HCX migration software and identifying alternative migration paths for environments without HCX access.

Why is this important?

• Customer Need: Organizations frequently need to migrate their OpenShift infrastructure between vCenter instances due to data center consolidation,
  hardware refreshes, or infrastructure modernization initiatives
• Current Gap: This migration scenario is not currently supported or documented, blocking customers from executing critical infrastructure changes
• Risk Mitigation: Without a supported migration path, customers may attempt unsupported procedures, leading to cluster instability, downtime, or data
  loss
• Competitive Position: Providing a clear migration strategy strengthens OpenShift's position in enterprise vSphere environments where infrastructure
  changes are routine

Scenarios

Primary Scenario - VCF9 with HCX:

• Migration of an OpenShift cluster from vCenter A to vCenter B using VMware HCX
• Storage migration from old datastore(s) to new datastore(s) during vCenter migration
• Live migration with minimal downtime requirements

Alternative Scenarios:

• Migration without HCX access (manual VM migration or cold migration approaches)
• Cross-vCenter migration while maintaining same datastores (vCenter upgrade/replacement scenario)
• Migration with datastore change only (same vCenter)
• Migration across different vSphere versions or VCF versions
• Migration with network topology changes (different distributed switches, NSX configurations)

Acceptance Criteria

• Document HCX-based migration procedure with step-by-step process, prerequisites, and validated testing results
• Identify and document at least 2 alternative migration approaches for environments without HCX
• Document all known limitations, risks, and unsupported configurations
• Provide decision matrix for customers to select appropriate migration approach based on their environment and constraints
• Document rollback procedures and recovery scenarios for each migration approach
• Identify required changes to OpenShift documentation, tooling, or supportability statements
• Create test plan for validating migration approaches in lab environment
• Document impact on cluster certificates, storage classes, node identities, and other infrastructure-dependent configurations

Dependencies (internal and external)

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Previous Work (Optional):

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Open questions::

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Done Checklist

• CI - CI is running, tests are automated and merged.
• Release Enablement <link to Feature Enablement Presentation>
• DEV - Upstream code and tests merged: <link to meaningful PR or GitHub Issue>
• DEV - Upstream documentation merged: <link to meaningful PR or GitHub Issue>
• DEV - Downstream build attached to advisory: <link to errata>
• QE - Test plans in Polarion: <link or reference to Polarion>
• QE - Automated tests merged: <link or reference to automated tests>
• DOC - Downstream documentation merged: <link to meaningful PR>