WilliamLam.com

OVFTool and VMware Cloud on AWS

by // 1 Comment

Recently, I had noticed a number of questions that have come up regarding the use of OVFTool with the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) service. I had a chance to take a look at this last Friday and I can confirm that customers can indeed use this tool to import/export VMs into VMC whether they are from a vSphere/vCloud Director-based environment or simply OVF/OVAs you have on your desktop. Outlined below are the requirements and steps that you must have setup before you can use OVFTool with VMC. In addition, I have also include an OVFTool command snippet which you can use and adapt in your own environment.

Requirements:

  1. You must setup VPN connection between your onPrem environment and the Management Gateway on VMC (direct internet access to ESXi is not supported)
  2. Configure the VMC Firewall to allow access between your onPrem and VMC's ESXi host on port 443 (data transfer occurs at ESXi host level)
  3. Specify the Workload VM Folder as a target
  4. Specify the Compute-ResourcePool Resource Pool as a target
  5. Specify the WorkloadDatastore Datastore as a target

Instructions:

Step 1 - Create a Management VPN connection, please see the official documentation here for more details.

Step 2 - Create a two new Firewall Rules that allow traffic from your onPrem environment to both vCenter Server and ESXi host on port 443. vCenter Server will obviously be used for UI/API access and for ESXi, this is where the data traffic transfer will take place.


Step 3 - Construct your OVFTool command-line arguments and ensure you are using the VM Folder "Workloads", Resource Pool "Compute-ResourcePool" and Datastore "WorkloadDatastore" as your target destination since the CloudAdmin user will have restrictive privileges within VMC.

Here is an example command to upload an OVA from my desktop to the VMC vCenter Server:

ovftool.exe `
--acceptAllEulas `
--name=William-To-The-Cloud `
--datastore=WorkloadDatastore `
--net:None=sddc-cgw-network-1 `
--vmFolder=Workloads `
C:\Users\primp\desktop\William.ova `
'vi://*protected email*:*protected email*/SDDC-Datacenter/host/Cluster-1/Resources/Compute-ResourcePool/'

Note: OVFTool also supports the ability to specify a VM that is residing in your vSphere environment as a source, so you do not have to export it locally to your desktop and you can directly transfer it (your client desktop acting as a proxy) to VMC.

Here is the output from running the above command:


Once the upload has completed, you should see your new VM appear in your vSphere Inventory

 

Getting started with Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) on VMware Cloud on AWS

by // 18 Comments

I had been hearing a lot of cool things about VMware's Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) but never tried the solution myself nor had a good understanding of what it actually provided. With the recently announced Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMWonAWS) offering being available, I thought this was a great way to get hands on with HCX and take advantage of my VMWonAWS infrastructure. Having only spent a couple of days with the solution, I can see why customers are excited for HCX and the new offering on VMWonAWS makes it super easy to consume. I also recently learned that HCX is now free for all VMWonAWS customers and you can easily live migrated your VMs to/from your onPrem environment!

There are a number of impressive capabilities that HCX offers, but two that really stood out to me which I thought was quite unique and interesting compared to other VM-based "migration" options. The first is that HCX can perform live VM migrations (vMotion) or replicated migrations (vSphere Replication) which includes scheduled switch over across different versions of vSphere (vSphere 5.x to/from vSphere 6.x). This is great for customers who may not be able to upgrade their underlying vSphere environment to 6.0 or later and take advantage of things like Cross vCenter vMotion feature which only supports VM migration between vSphere 6.0u3 to/from 6.x.

The second capability is that HCX can abstract and protect the underlying ESXi hosts by not requiring direct connectivity between the source and destination ESXi hosts. Traditionally, for vMotion and vSphere Replication traffic, you either had to stretch the VLAN or ensure the VMkernel interface was routable so that it can communicate with the destination ESXi hosts for data transfers. This was not always possible and adds additional networking requirements which can be challenging to implement depending on how your network infrastructure is configured. The way HCX solves this problem is by using a special HCX Cloud Gateway which securely proxy vMotion and vSphere Replication traffic from the on-premises environment out to the respective HCX Cloud Gateway Peer which then gets transfered to destination vSphere environment. Below is a diagram to help illustrate this:


Note: HCX also supports WAN optimization (compression and de-duplication) out of the box, which the diagram includes as that is what I had deployed in my env. This is an optional virtual appliance that can be deployed at each location ensuring efficient data transfer between the source and destination vSphere environments.

While going through and getting HCX configured on both my VMWonAWS and onPrem environment, I had ran into a few minor gotchas and to help others avoid some of the issues I had ran into, I figure I would outline the process and include some additional tips that can be help.

[Read more...]

VMware Cloud on AWS - VM Creation Date available in vSphere API

by // 2 Comments

I was recently doing some work with my VMware Cloud on AWS instance and I needed to verify something in the vSphere API. Since I already had a browser open, rather than context switch, I decided to quickly open up the vSphere MOB which is a debugging tool that provides a browser interface to the vSphere SOAP API. While going through the Virtual Machine view, I was pleasantly surprised to see a new VM config property called createDate which looks to give you the original date/time of when the VM was first created!


This is probably one of the most frequently asked question that I have seen from VI Admins around basic VM management and I am sure everyone has probably had a need to pull this type of information at least once in their career. Historically, VM creation date was not an easy thing to thing to find and success of retrieving that data was dependent on the retention of your vCenter Server Events database since that is where the information is stored. This means if you only retain 6 months worth of historical events, you will not be able to retrieve creation dates for VMs that were created prior to that.

[Read more...]