Last week I upgraded a vCenter 4.0 installation to 4.1u1. The vCenter was installed on a 32-bit VM so I needed to migrate the installation to a new 64-bit host.

I tried to do the migration according to the vSphere 4.1 upgrade pre-installation requirements and considerations guide. But sadly I got an error during the migration process.

RESTORE FILELIST is terminating abnormally.

The error is described in this thread at vmware communities.

Also, the datamigration scripts makes the original vCenter database corrupt. So if the datamigration fails, as it did for me, the original installation is trashed. (Luckily the datamigration scripts exports a backup before trashing it. But this procedure stinks anyway.)

So how did I migrate? Well I found a workaround and did the following.:

On the old vCenter 4.0 server (32-bit)

1. Stop the vCenter service
2. Install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
3. Open Management Studio and detached the vCenter database.
4. Copy the database files.
5. Copy the % ProgramData% \ VMware \ VMware VirtualCenter \ SSL folder.
6. Shutdown the vCenter VM.

On the new vCenter 4.1u1 server (64-bit)

1. Install vCenter 4.1u1 with all the default settings. (This installs SQLExpress and the vCenter database)
2. Uninstall vCenter from add and remove programs. (This does not remove the SQLExpress installation)
3. Restore the % ProgramData% \ VMware \ VMware VirtualCenter \ SSL
4. Install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
5. Detach the newly installed database and attach the one from the old vCenter server.
6. Create a ODBC connection to the local SQLExpress server with the old vCenter database.
7. Install vCenter 4.1u1 and choose existing ODBC connection during the installation. The installer will detect the old vCenter database and upgrade it.

I wonder why VMware don’t recommend this procedure in the first place?