One of the things I looked at recently was moving VMs from vSphere into vCloud Director. vCD has that native capability so long as your SysAdmin and you happy to take one-VM at a time. That didn’t seem to me very “multi-tenancy” orientated, and nor did seem to make it the tenants decision where VMs should live. At the same time I’ve had vCloud Connector in my lab for a couple of months, gradually making it work with my various “vCloud Sponsors” – the VMware Hybrid Cloud Eval, Stratogen and iLand. I figured that vCloud Connector would make a much better tool for moving vApps from vSphere into vApp for vCloud Director.
I started of creating a simple vApp in vSphere for testing purposes using TTY Linux, which is a tiny distribution of Linux which provides a SSH, HTTP and FTP services:
In my vCloud Connector configuration I have setup the vCC Nodes – to allow for access to both my vSphere and vCloud layers – once the vSphere vApp is powered off – I can use vCloud Connector to copy it to my Private (or Public) cloud:
Next I select which cloud I want to copy the vApp to – and what vCloud Catalog will be used at the temporary transfer area to move the vApp itself:
Then I select which Organizational Virtual Datacenter it should live in:
Finally I need to set my network parameters – by “fencing” the application I can ensure that despite the network destination my application will not need a re-IP. I can also have the vApp powered on once the copy has completed, and the temporary files in the catalog removed…
The copy process can be monitored from the Task pane like so:
This copy process essentially automates the process of exporting a vSphere vApp to an .OVF template – uploading it to the vCloud Director catalog, and then deploying that from the catalog.
