VMware vCloud Director – Installation of PostgreSQL and Migration from Oracle

In one of my lab instances, I currently have Oracle still running as my backend vCloud Director database. In this post, I am going to document the steps it takes to install Postgres10 and migrate away from Oracle.

Preparation

First, taking a snapshot of my vCD instance – always back up before making any type of database changes! 🙂

Next, my system is a little dated, so I am running a yum update to get all of the latest binaries before we install PgSQL.

I am also running RHEL, so your steps may different based on your distribution.

Installing and Starting PostgreSQL 10

My esteemed colleague, Sean Smith, wrote a nice post on setting up an all-in-one vCD appliance here so I am going to borrow his steps on installing PgSQL 10.

Get the RPM and start the install –

rpm -Uvh https://yum.postgresql.org/10/redhat/rhel-7-x86_64/pgdg-centos10-10-2.noarch.rpm
yum install postgresql10-server postgresql10

Let’s initialize the database –

service postgresql-10 initdb

From there, using chkconfig to enable it to start on boot –

chkconfig postgresql-10 on

Ready to start!

service postgresql-10 start

Let’s change the password to the default postgres account (ignore my superweak password) –

Before we can make the authentication change, we need to set the default postgres user password.

Switch user to postgres and type in psql followed by a \password to set it –

su - postgres
psql
\password

\q and go back into the root console.

Finally, we need to allow authentication to the database. I am going to allow full access to local and remote logins to the database.

Edit the /var/lib/pgsql/10/data/pg_hba.conf file and modify this line –

local all all  peer

to

local all all md5

And adding this line below –

host all all 0.0.0.0/0 md5

Now, edit the postgresql.conf file and remove the # from the ‘listen_addresses line –

Finally, restart the postgresql-10 service –

We are now ready for the next step which is creating the new vCloud database that we can move over to.

Setting up the new vCloud database on PostgreSQL 10

We are now ready to create our new database and prepare it for the migration.

First, let’s switch user over to the postgres account and enter psql –

su - postgres

We need to create the vcloud account with a password –

create user vcloud with password 'vcloudpass';

Now I’m ready to create my vcloud database. I already have my vcloud user account on the system, so no need to create that again. Following these instructions from the VMware master docs.

create database vcloud owner vcloud;

Finally, altering it so it enables the database owner on login:

alter role vcloud with login;

From here, one can setup SSL for secured communication. Since this is my lab, I’m going to skip over that configuration.

Stopping the vCD Instance and Migrating

Let’s stop the vCD service –

Now we can follow the instructions here on the documentation on using the cell-management-tool for dbmigrate –

cell-management-tool is under /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin –

Now we are ready to run the cell-management-tool dbmigrate command. For me, this was my configuration – it will differ based on your setup.

./cell-management-tool dbmigrate -dbhost vcd-01a.corp.local -dbport 5432 -dbuser vcloud -dbname vcloud -dbpassword vcloudpass

Processing….

Awesome!

Ready now to run the reconfigure-database command, and boom! Complete.

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool reconfigure-database -dbhost vcd-01a.corp.local -dbport 5432 -dbuser vcloud -dbname vcloud -dbpassword vcloudpass -dbtype postgres

Let’s start back up vCD….

We are back up and running!

Lessons Learned

1. While this was not a difficult task, every distribution is different, inclusive of Sean’s post where he did the installation and setup of PostgreSQL-10.
2. The cell-management-tool works great for database migrations to PostgreSQL-10.
3. Note that I did not setup SSL communication. This requires further steps to set it up. Sean did a great job on the steps here.
4. Test, test, test before you do this in production.

Thanks!

-Daniel