I needed to migrate a vCenter server that I had installed as a VM in a vSphere 5.0 environment. I wanted to get it moved to a different datastore. I had all the ESXi servers under the vCenter control. I needed to migrate it like this to get it to high availability (HA) storage. This is what I did to move it. The key was the first step. I am sure there are several other ways migrate the vCenter VM, especially if your datastores are already on HA storage.

From the vSphere client logged into your vCenter server, disconnect the ESXi host that your vCenter server is running on, as well as the one you want to migrate it to.

This next step could be done before or after disconnecting the hosts from vCenter:
Login to the vCenter server and install the VMware Converter.

Launch the converter and set up a job to migrate the vCenter VM to the new host location. I needed to migrate to new host, because that is where my HA storage was located.

Once the converter is completed, I shut down the old vCenter server, and started up the server in the new location.

The network did not migrate properly for me. I don’t know if this is something I missed or just the way the converter works, but I needed re-configure the IP address. That was not preserved in the migration. Perhaps, because of the change in the MAC address. Once the IP address is changed, you can either reboot the vCenter server or re-register the name with updated IP address. For me, the DNS record was updated, because the converted vCenter server picked up a DHCP address instead of the static I had assigned the server before the migration.

After I got the IP/DNS issue resolved, I connected to the vCenter server via the vSphere client like I did before the migration. Then, I just neeed to re-connect the ESXi hosts and everything was back up and ready to go.

Note: No other guests needed to be shutdown during this process.