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Bulk VM Migration using new Cross vCenter vMotion Utility Fling

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Over the last few years, I have spoken to a number of customers who have greatly benefited from the ability to live migrate Virtual Machines across different vCenter Servers that are NOT part of the same vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) Domain, which I had first shared back in 2015 here and here. This extended capability of the Cross vCenter vMotion feature enabled customers to solve new use cases that were challenging, especially for scenarios such as Datacenter migration, consolidation or even migrating existing workloads from their current environment into new SDDC deployments such as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as an example.

Although customers could initiate Cross vCenter vMotions using the vSphere API which included PowerCLI (Move-VM cmdlet was enhanced in 6.5, more details here), the overall experience was still not as friendly. This was especially true for customers who may only have a small number of VMs to migrate and prefer a UI-based interface rather than an API/CLI only option. In addition, for large number of VM migrations, there was not an easy way to perform "batch" VM migrations that was easily consumable for folks who may not have a strong background in Automation or the vSphere APIs.

Today, I am pleased to share a new VMware Fling called the Cross vCenter Migration Utility that will help simplify the consumption of initiating VM migration(s) across different vCenter Servers, especially between dispart SSO Domains where a graphical interface was not available. This solution was developed out of our VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Engineering group which is part of the Integrated Systems Business Unit at VMware. I had spoken to a number of folks within the group about the extended Cross vCenter vMotion capability and I was super excited when I heard they were planning to release this tool as a Fling and make it available to all customers. I was fortunately to have been involved in the project alongside the Engineering lead Vishal Gupta and we are excited that we can finally talk about this project and see how customers will be using this new tool.

UPDATE (05/07/18) - The Fling has just been updated to 2.0 with the following new features:

  • Added support to select individual host as the placement target
  • Added support for migrating VMs with shared datastore
  • Added clone functionality in addition to relocate
  • Added resource summary details for placement targets
  • Added a prompt to verify site thumbprint during SSL verification
  • Added a link to refresh vm list in the inventory view
  • Updated REST APIs to add operation type parameter

Cross vCenter Migration Utility Fling

Cross vCenter vMotion Requirements: KB 2106952

Download Fling here


Features

  • Completely UI-driven workflow for VM migration
  • Provides REST API for managing migration operations
  • Works with vCenter not part of the same SSO domain
  • Supports both live/cold migration of VMs
  • Batch migration of multiple VMs in parallel
  • Flexible network mappings b/w source and destination sites

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Deploying NSX-T VIBs and/or creating custom NSX-T Image Profile

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Similiar to its earlier predecessor, NSX-T also provides complete lifecycle management (LCM) of its underlying NSX components (Controllers, Edges and Managers) including the Fabric Nodes (e.g. ESXi and/or KVM hosts). Additionally, a new Upgrade Coordinator is now part of NSX-T which greatly simplifies the patching and updating of the network virtualization platform. However, for existing vSphere customers who already have a process for distributing VMware VIBs using vSphere Update Manager (VUM) and/or custom Image Profiles, being able to leverage their existing methods is quite important. This is especially true for customers or system integrators who wish to slipstream all necessary VIBs as part of their base ESXi image for initial deployment which may come in the form of an automated installation via Kickstart and/or even manual install using an ISO image.

The good news is that like NSX-V, NSX-T also supports the same set of deployment methods that customers are already familiar with. I had recently looked into this due to a few questions that I and a few other folks had during our NSX-T Bootcamp training a couple of weeks back. I also did not see anything in the existing NSX-T documentation and figure it would be useful to outline the specific steps for each of the installation methods, especially when creating a custom ESXi Image Profile using PowerCLI which requires a particular order.

Note: Auto Deploy is currently not supported with NSX-T.

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Translating vSAN VM Object IDs (UUID to VM and VM to UUID)

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I was working on one of my vSAN Clusters a few weeks back and I had noticed a bunch of vSAN Objects being listed under the "Other" category within the vSAN Virtual Objects Health view as shown in the screenshot below.


I could not figure out what files or VMs these vSAN objects were actually associated to and it was especially strange since all VMs that were deployed on my vSAN Cluster were already properly showing up under this view and I could not account for these "Other" vSAN Objects. I had reached out to a few folks to see if anyone knew how to identify these objects and the only suggestion I had received back was try to run this python vSAN Health Status script located on one of the ESXi hosts participating in the vSAN Cluster to see if it provided what I needed.

The script is located at /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/vsan-health-status.pyc and you run it like the following:

python /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/vsan-health-status.pyc > /tmp/output

The above command just runs the script and stores its output (which is quite extensive) to /tmp/output. Once the script finishes, you can then open up the file using vi and search for the specific vSAN Object UUID in question. I was able to eventually identify what these vSAN Object UUIDs were mapped to (more on this later), but the overall experience was not ideal and it required SSH access to ESXi host which most customers disable by default. In addition, the process was pretty manual and tedious if you wanted to check multiple vSAN Object UUIDs.

So what did I do, well I looked for a better way of course! It turns out the output produced by vsan-health-status.pyc is actually all available using the vSAN Management API. Not only can you obtain this information programmatically and remotely but you can also retrieve this information by simply going to vCenter Server rather than having to directly connect to an ESXI host which was huge negative for me regarding the previous solution.

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