Datacenter migration - vCenter and Azure

[Tim Davis]

Good afternoon!

I'm seeking insights into the behavior of vCenter Discovery and Cloud Discovery in ServiceNow when Virtual Machine Instances are migrated from one data center to another. Specifically, I would like to understand:

1. Are existing relationships between computers/server CIs maintained, altered, or removed during the migration?
2. Does this process result in the creation of new Virtual Machine Instance records?
3. Is there an expectation within ServiceNow for users to manually adjust previous relationships after migration?
4. How are the server/computer records impacted, will they have multiple VM Instance relationships? Does that impact them having inconsistent operational statues? etc.

Any guidance or documentation on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[sshilimkar]

Did you get any solution on this ?

[Aarti6]

We are seeing multiple datacenters for a VM. Is this expected behaviour in ServiceNow

[Tim Davis]

@Aarti6 

We've identified that many of our issues stem from conflicts in the migration order of operations—specifically, situations where both old and new VMs share the same hostname and are active on the network simultaneously.

To prevent this, the old VM should first have its hostname updated, followed by a discovery process. Only then should the CMDB be updated. This sequence helps reduce the risk of an overloaded CI—where a single CI record is associated with two VMs—due to identification rules that rely on the CI name.

Once this process is complete, the migrated VM can be safely created using the original hostname. The old VM can be renamed with a suffix such as -old, -retired, or -migrated to clearly distinguish it and avoid conflicts during discovery and CI reconciliation.