Migrate VMs and Networking to vCloud Director – Video Walkthrough

I wanted to provide a quick walkthrough on how easy it is to import a VM (or adopt a VM) into a tenant organization for vCloud Director.

Tomas Fojta covers a lot of great detail on when this was introduced in vCD 8.20 here. 

In this video, I go through and show how I moved a tenant workload (DanielApp) along with a 172.16.102.0/24 network to vCloud Director and NSX.

While this does require a stepped process, it’s a pretty seamless process.

Migration Steps:

1. Move the routing interface from the current physical underlay to the NSX Edge inside of the vCloud Director tenant organization (DCP-Edge-01)
2. Switch over the VMNIC for the workloads to the logical switch presented by DCP-Edge-01
3. Drag the VM to the orgVDC resource pool that’s provisioned by vCloud Director. Done!

Note 1 and 2 do require some level of coordination with your network team with a brief maintenance window (route changes and validation). Moreover, the important distinction is we are allowing a tenant to utilize NSX functionality alongside vCloud Director.

Step 3 is the easiest. vCloud Director does all of the work and shows it in the UI without any further intervention. This is a great feature that demonstrates vCD can be utilized for existing tenant workloads that may be in a “naked” vCenter environment (or utilizing an existing CMP they are moving away from).

Anyway, here’s the video I created that shows me moving DanielApp to vCloud Director under my “Daniel” organization.

Last bit I’ll leave you with – while it’s great to migrate both the network and to vCD, this may not be possible based on use case. Other migration method could be exposing the existing distributed virtual portgroup as a vCD External Network to the pVDC, then the oVDC. Then it’s as simple as just dragging in the VM(s) to the resource pool.

However, I do lose any self-service and NSX functionality, which could include overlapping networks when I scale out tenants.

Happy migrating!

-Daniel