Move VMs from vSphere to vCloud Director 8.10 instantly

[minnahmetovrr]

Good day everyone.

We are importing VMs from vSphere 5.5 to vCloud Director, selecting "Move VM" option while importing it to a vApp.

Sometimes vCloud clones the VM and deletes the old one (it takes several minutes)...but rarely it just migrate the VM (that is much quicker).

Now the question: Is there a way to always migrate rather than clone?

What are the conditions of instant move VMs without cloning first?

Thank you in advance.

[Sreec]

Haven't observed this behavior till now. Ideally when we import the VM to VCD,based on the selection( Move/Clone)  Move - Will  move the VM all the way to respective Orgvdc App , Clone- Clone the Source VM and create a new instance to respective Orgvdc App

[AdamRushUK]

I remember looking at this behaviour.

I'm not sure if it's changed now in 8.1, but I found the following a while back: http://www.davidhill.co/faq/

Question

When importing a vApp from vSphere in VCD 1.5 using “move” (and not “copy”), it seems that VCD will always clone it to the datastore that has the most free space. Obviously, this takes a non-trivial amount of time for large vApps. Is there a way to prevent VCD from cloning the vApp?

Answer

Thats correct, vCloud Director always carries out a clone operation even when selecting a move. It then deletes the previous copy after the clone process has completed. There is no way to prevent the cloning as of v1.5 I am afraid. You are not the first person to highlight this.

You can watch the "vCloud transfer" directory to see if the move is still doing a clone; I expect it will be.

[mjha]

Question

When importing a vApp from vSphere in VCD using “move” (and not “copy”), it seems that VCD will always clone it to the datastore that has the most free space. Obviously, this takes a non-trivial amount of time for large vApps. Is there a way to prevent VCD from cloning the vApp?

Answer

There is no way to prevent VM from cloning first (either you chose Move or Clone option). In case of Move, the VM is deleted post import is completed in vCloud Director. This behaviour has not changed even in vCD 8.X.

While performing a clone or Move, you should have atleast that much free space equal to size of VM (the more is better). In case of contention at vSphere datastore level, clone operation can take much longer time than usual.

[evanchik]

alexhunt86‌ and AdamRushUK‌ provide correct answers for the present product behavior.

In the upcoming release the product is going to be more intelligent about importing VMs from vSphere to vCloud Director. Specifically, we're going to do the following:

• Prefer the VM's current datastores if they are available to the Virtual Datacenter
• Allow flexible mapping of Disks to Storage Profiles during the import operation itself
• Use migrate instead of Clone+Delete during VM moves

This will allow you to adopt a Virtual Machine in to vCloud Director with the minimum amount of impact to the workload or the infrastructure.

[MinnakhmetovR]

We have found necessary conditions:

In order for the import from vCenter to be a Migrate action over a Clone one, we need to have the VM meet two conditions:

1) It must already be on a Datastore that backs the Storage Policy we are choosing the VM to be on during the Import action.

2) It must be on a Host that backs the Organization VDC we select during the Import action.

If the VM meets both of these conditions then the Import action should be a Migrate instead of a Clone.