Migration from vCD to vCAC

[Helican]

I am in need of some insight (links, direct advice, anything) into the migration process from vCD to vCAC. We are in a position where we have not yet gone live with our environment to our internal customers (there will be no public offering of this service). We have around 200 offices/orgs around the US that will be serviced by this product, each (now) with its own IT infrastructure and methodologies. Our current environment has vCD and is running v5.5 iirc. In my research, it was said that a migration tool was promised (http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240204421/VMware-splits-vCloud-Director-into-vCente...)

Specifically I am requesting;

1. Are there currently a migration whitepaper / plan / utility / tool / process in place from VMware? Links to such information would be greatly appreciated

2. What are specific pain-points in this transition?

3. Since no customers yet are serviced by vCD, will this ease the transition?

4. Any other thoughts or resources I could use to help inform my upper management about the process.

Most of the information I was able to glean from cursory searches was from 2013-2014 and seemed to be a bit dated especially with the release of v6.x of vRealize and vCAC.

Thanks in advance.

[admin]

I know there is a tool being developed to migrate vCD vms to vRA but it won't be publicly available any time soon so I doubt there is much information on this just right now. I suspect we'll hear more throughout 2015 on this subject. Here's a post to get you going. Migrate a VM from vCloud Director to vCloud Automation Center | Brian Ragazzi

Oli

[Helican]

Thx for the response, oliverleach. I have read the same article myself and see that the process is not the most efficient or the best use of resources especially in a larger environment. Right now the answer for a production environment seems to be to stand up a parallel vCAC infrastructure and then use the process in that article to move resources. In an org of our size, complexity and customer base as demanding as ours (legal field) the challenges are beginning to look ugly if the transition is made to happen after our "go live" date.

Any other high-level input on this issue?

[qc4vmware · Accepted solution]

I took a different approach to our vCD migration.  I went a route that assumes that we want to re-use the same hardware and do an "in place" style migration.  I am not attempting to create any multi machine blueprint mappings so each vm in a vApp is just going to become a stand alone vm in vCAC.  The workflows take a vApp as the input and loop through each vm and do the following:

Assumptions - vCAC has been setup to manage the same resources that these vm's are currently using in vCD and the vms appear in the vCAC inventory as unmanaged vms.

1. Shutdown each vm

2. Shutdown the vApp

3. Remove all snapshots

4. Consolidate disks

5. Make a backup of the original .vmx file for each vm.

6. Update the virtual machine config to remove the value for cloud.uuid and update the value for displayName to be the vm name minus the vCD uuid.  This is ok to do in our environment as there are not duplicate hostnames in use.

7. Unregister the vm from vCenter

8. Create a new folder and vmx file and move the virtual disk(s) to this new folder.

9. Register the new vmx (keep the UUID)

10. Rename the vCAC vm entity to match the name in vCenter

11. Run the vCAC plugin work flow named "Import vCenter Virtual Machine"

12. Delete the vCD vApp

This process worked great for us.  Hope this helps.

[GrantOrchardVMw]

This is likely not the answer you are looking for, but have a chat with VMware about PSO to perform the migration. The risk goes away, although the cost goes up.

Send me a DM with your location details and I can recommend a contact for you.

Grant

[Helican]

Thanks so much for your willingness to share your process!

[Helican]

I suspect that will have to be at least a part of the plan.