I was thrilled to know that my blog has been voted number 12 in the Top25 vBlogs voting! Jumping 8 positions from 20th to 12th is something I haven’t expected by any stretch of the imagination!

Thank you for voting, and for pushing me further to make this blog better! I have so many ideas (and surprises) coming on the way soon.

Stay tuned!

There was an interesting question on the VMware community forums and I thought it would be good to blog about it – How can you move your VMs in and out of your cloud that is managed by vCloud Director?

I’m not talking here about vMotion, but rather the native place your VM is running in. You might think that everything at the end is running inside ESX (and you are right) but there is one thing you might know about. If you try to migrate a VM that was originally created by vCloud Director and place it in an ESX server that is not managed/prepared by vCD, you will simply not be able to. You will get an error similar to the following:

Shocking? Not really. This is something very important to always keep your cloud VMs within the boundaries of vCD.

Let’s take a closer look.

Migrating the VMs from vSphere to vCloud Director:    

If you want to migrate a VM from your vSphere environment to vCD, you can simply go to your Organization -> My Cloud -> vApps -> and then choose the “Import from vSphere” icon in the tool bar.

You will then get a dialog box asking you which VM you want to migrate from the vSphere inventory, and whether you want to move or copy it.

So far it’s pretty straight forward. Now let’s see how to do that the other way around.

Migrating the VMs from vCloud Director to vSphere:

As I mentioned above, if you tried to migrate a VM that was originally created in vCD to a host that is not part of your cloud recourses (aka not prepared by vCD), you will get an error preventing you from doing that. The reason being is that all the cloud VMs are actually pinned by a custom vCenter fields in the database to differentiate them from the other native vSphere VMs. These custom fields start with: system.service.vmware.vsla and then followed by the vCD system ID (in my case its HyperCloud as you see in the first screenshot).

Now, how can you remove that field in order to migrate your VM outside of your cloud? there are two ways to do that:

1 – You can simply unregister your VM from vCenter Server (using your vSphere Client), and then browse to you datastore, write click on the VM’s VMX file and select “Add to inventory”. By doing that you will be able to automatically remove the custom field and add the VM as if it was never created in your cloud. Of course you may Storage-vMotion the VM later on to another datastore/location for easier management.

2 – The second way is to browse through your vCenter mob browser and remove that custom field manually as shown in the screenshot below.

Of course i’m more in favor of the first option. It’s easier and cleaner!

UPDATE: Duncan Epping over at Yellow-Bricks.com wrote another solid solution for this. Make sure to read his article at this link. Duncan and I don’t seem to be agree on some points, but that’s the beauty of blogging – different views and opinions is always important.

I noticed something cool today while playing with the vShield Manager in my vCloud Director lab. You can actually enable the SSH on your vSM by issuing this command from the VM console:

ssh start

Note that you have to be in the privileged mode (by typing “enable”) in order to start the SSH daemon. This might be useful for large enterprises or service providers with lots of vCenter instances and vSM. You can have this easy SSH access or even integrate it in your management software instead of the manual and traditional process of opening the VM consoles.

UPDATE: [16-09-2010] Version 2.5 is released! Checkout the new features below! Please note that this is not an official VMware tool. Use it at your own risk!

My colleague, Luke Terheyden, coded a very useful tool to clean-up the vSphere environments prepared and managed by VMware vCloud Director. I was personally using it throughout the process of cleaning/reinstalling the different Redwood RTQA releases in my remote physical lab. You can imagine how much time and effort this tool saved me instead of going through the manual process.

I thought you also might be interested in the same since you will be probably in the phase of testing and evaluation of vCD at the time of writing these lines. I contacted Luke yesterday and he was very kind to approve sharing his tool with the public. To quote Luke’s own words: “I’m satisfied that it’s been used internally enough to be stable for a wider audience, so go ahead and post it on your blog! I would be thrilled if it could also help our customers.”

With that said, here is the download link.

The CloudCleaner removes the following (you have the choice to select whatever you want):

• Virtual machines
• Portgroups
• VM inventory folders
• Resource pools
• Datastores
• Networks
• Uninstalls host agents

Features:

• Written in java, so it’s cross-platform (It has been tested on Windows so far)
• Easy-to-use UI
• Intelligent authentication handling – if your login credentials fail, you’ll be given the chance to re-auth in realtime
• Fast! Uses up to 2000 simultaneous threads
• Single jar deployment – download and run
• Auto-detects developer settings – vCenter IP and credentials
• Safe – auto-detects inconsistencies and repairs them

New in release 2.5:

• more robust error handling for edge cases
• much smarter vCD item detection
• no longer cleans VC VMs not related to vCloud Director
• no longer wipes unrelated folders found in datastores
• new – advanced ‘clean all’ mode, in case you really want to clean unrelated items!
• fixed some thread lock issues
• VC crawl engine optimizations
• now supports command-line usage
• fixed some scan / rescan bugs
• now detects orphaned objects (e.g. removing a VM leaves a folder behind, etc.)

Screenshot:

At the time of writing these lines, the Planet V12n feed is on FIRE! I will keep it simple then and save you some reading.

Eric Siebert @ http://vSphere-Land.com has opened the votes once again for the 25 Blogs in 2H10! Eric has a very fair criteria for voting based on: Longevity, Length, Frequency and Quality! I claim to have the second, and the forth, may be the first, but definitely not the third! I’m working on it, and you should read about this in details in my next newsletter.

With that said, I’d be thrilled if i stayed in the top 25! If not, then I will do my best to gain my seat back among this extremely talented and competent bloggers in the next cycle!

To refresh your memory about my past 6 months published contents, I’m listing here the top 5 article views based on WordPress stats plug-in:

• Diagram: ESX Memory Management and Monitoring v1.0
• VMware vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H – (Part 1 & Part2)
• Diagram: VMware vCloud Director Networking Architecture
• The VM Crowd – Episode 1: I’m On Twitter
• Video Guide: Taking VMware vCloud Director for a spin…and on the GO!