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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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vSphere SDK for JavaScript Fling released

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The VMware Fling team has just released another cool new Fling, the vSphere SDK for JavaScript. This Fling is especially interesting as it provides the underlying SDK framework used by the popular ESXi Embedded Host Client Fling which was released back in August of last year. I came to learn about this project during last years internal R&D Innovation Offsite (RADIO) conference which is held annually and can be thought of as the VMworld conference for VMware employees.

One of the biggest highlight of the conference for me personally is checking out the expo floor where you get to see what other VMware Engineering teams have been working on whether it is the next big feature, product or new ideas that they might be thinking about. It was during my walk through that I met Rostislav Hristov, one of the Engineers who worked on the vSphere SDK for JavaScript. I was really impressed at what Rostislav built and luckily he was already in touch with the Embedded Host Client Engineers to see how they could leverage his JavaScript SDK as the initial prototype had made calls directly using the vSphere MOB which was not very friendly to develop against.

There has been a number of improvements to the vSphere SDK for JavaScript since I last saw it and although the name contains "vSphere", it definitely supports more than just the vSphere API endpoint. In fact, with this single SDK you can interact with vCenter Server Single Sign-On (SSO) API, vCloud Suite API which covers capabilities like Tagging and Content Library as well as the Site Recovery Manager (SRM) APIs! For customers and partners that are looking to develop their own web portals or interfaces that can integrate with these APIs, this will be a handy tool to have.

To get started, the vSphere SDK for JavaScript contains a README file that contains additional instructions on setting up the SDK as well as a couple of samples that demonstrates each of the supported API endpoints:

  • vimService.js - Sample using the vSphere API
  • stsService.js - Sample using the SSO API
  • cisServices.js - Sample using the vCloud Suite API
  • srmService.js - Sample using the SRM API

Here is the command to run the vimService.js sample which will also require you to set the environmental variable NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0 if you are using the default VMware self-signed SSL Certificate.

NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0 babel-node samples/vimService.js

vsphere-sdk-for-javascript-0
Once the sample has started up, you will be prompted with a URL to open in your browser. In the vimService.js example, you will be able to login to either a vCenter Server or ESXi host as seen in the screenshot below.

vsphere-sdk-for-javascript-1
Once logged in, you should see a simple listing of the different inventory objects in your vSphere enviornment.

vsphere-sdk-for-javascript-2
In the stsService.js sample, once logged in by specifying the address to your PSC/SSO instance, you should see that a SAML token was issued.

vsphere-sdk-for-javascript-3
The cisService.js sample exercises several operations using a mixture of both the vSphere API as well as the new vCloud Suite API. It does require connecting to a vCenter Server 6.0 environment as it will be performing operations using the new vSphere Content Library feature as well as some VM operations. Do not worry, once the operations have been completed, the script will automatically clean itself up. This is a great sample if you want to see how you could make use of the different APIs all through this single SDK.

vsphere-sdk-for-javascript-4-new
I did not have an SRM environment up and running to test the srmService.js sample, but you can see from the code that it will list all of the recovery plans and their current state. For more details on how the individual APIs work, you can refer to the documentation included in the vSphere SDK for JavaScript or the official API documentation for the individual products. If you have any feedback or comments about this Fling, please leave a comment on the Fling site here as I am sure the Engineers would love to hear what you think!

Windows Server 2012 fix is out for the VCS to VCSA Migration Fling!

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Happy New Years everyone! Here is the first post of 2016 🙂

I know many of you have been anxiously waiting for a fix to the Winexe bug that causes the VCS to VCSA Migration Fling to fail when migrating from a vCenter Server that runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (includes R2) OS to the VCSA. It has taken a bit longer than we all had hoped due to legal reviews and such, but today I am please to announce that we now have an updated release to the VCS to VCSA Migration appliance (v0.9.1). For customers using Windows Server 2012, WinRM will be used instead of Winexe due to the Windows bug that has been identified and will require a couple of additional configurations on the source Windows vCenter Server prior to starting the migration process. For more details, please refer to the documentation on the Fling site. Customers using Windows Server 2008, Winexe will continue to work as it does today.

In addition to this fix, we also now support specifying a custom port for the Microsoft SQL Server Database in case you had changed it from the default of 1433, which a few customers have asked for.

migration-applipance-0.9.1
I would like to give a big thanks to both Mike and Ravi for working tirelessly on getting this fix out as soon as they could along with all the legal hurdles. Let us know if you have any feedback by either leaving a comment below or better yet, interact with the Engineers by leaving a comment on the Fling site!