I am considering redesigning our virtual infrastructure, moving from Citrix XenServer to VMware vSphere. We currently operate a small virtual environment of 5 VMs as follows:
1x SBS 2008 x64
1x Windows Server 2003 x86
1x CentOS 6.3 x86
2x CentOS 6.4 x64
What I need to know is how easy it would be to move the VMs from one environment to another. We plan to use a new set of HDDs in our server, leaving the old Citrix installation on a completely different set - should anything go wrong we can simply swap the HDDs out and revert back to the Citrix environment. The VMs currently have XenTools installed, and we have a full backup of each VM which can be restored on to a bare metal installation - in which case we would simply ensure the backup is up to date, swap the HDDs round, install VMware and then restore the VMs into the VMware environment.
Would this be possible without the need to reinstall the VMs from scratch?
If so, the VMs are also running XenTools - would this need uninstalling before restoring into the VMware environment or could we do that after the restore?
Finally has anyone migrated from Citrix to VMware themselves who can tell me how easy (if at all) the process was?
Thanks in advance.