[SOLVED] Migrating vCenter Notifications

Why is this a problem?

VMware upgrades and migrations still comprise a large chunk of what I do in my job. If it is an in-place upgrade it is often more straightforward. The main consideration is making sure all compatibility checks are made. But if it is a rebuild, things get a bit more complicated.

Take for example a vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance migration. If you are migrating between 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5 you are covered by the vCenter Server Migration Tool. Recently I came across a customer using vSphere 5.1 (yes, it is not as uncommon as you might think). vCenter Server Migration Tool does not support migration from vSphere 5.1, which is fair enough, as it is end of support was August 2016. But as a result, you end up being on your own with your upgrade endeavours and have to do a lot of the things manually. One of such things is migrating vCenter notifications.

You can go and do it by hand. Using a few PowerCLI commands you can list the currently configured notifications and then recreate them on the new vCenter. But knowing how clunky and slow this process is, I doubt you are looking forward to spend half a day configuring each of the dozens notifications one by one by hand (I sure am not).

I offer an easy solution

You may have seen a comic over on xkcd called “Is It Worth The Time?“. Which gives you an estimate of how long you can work on making a routine task more efficient before you are spending more time than you save (across five years). As an example, if you can save one hour by automating a task that you do monthly, even if you spend two days on automating it, you will still brake even in five years.

Knowing how often I do VMware upgrades, it is well worth for me to invest time in automating it by scripting. Since you do not do upgrades that often, for you it is not, so I wrote this script for you.

If you simply want to get the job done, you can go ahead and download it from my GitHub page here (you will also need VMware PowerCLI installed on your machine for it to work) and then run it like so:

.\copy-vcenter-alerts-v1.0.ps1 -SourceVcenter old-vc.acme.com -DestinationVcenter new-vc.acme.com

Script includes help topics, that you can view by running the following command:

Get-Help -full .\copy-vcenter-alerts-v1.0.ps1

Or if you are curious, you can read further to better understand how script works.

How does this work?

First of all, it is important to understand the terminology used in vSphere:

• Alarm trigger – a set of conditions that must be met for an alarm warning and alert to occur.
• Alarm action – operations that occur in response to triggered alarms. For example, email notifications.

Script takes source and destination vCenter IP addresses or host names as parameters and starts by retrieving the list of existing alerts. Then it compares alert definitions and if alert doesn’t exist on the destination, it will be skipped, so be aware of that. Script will show you a warning and you will be able to make a decision about what to do with such alert later.

Then for each of the source alerts, that exists on the destination, script recreates actions, with exact same triggers. Trigger settings, such as repeats (enabled/disabled) and trigger state changes (green to yellow, yellow to red, etc) are also copied.

Script will not attempt to recreate an action that already exists, so feel free to run the script multiple times, if you need to.

What script does not do

1. Script does not copy custom alerts – if you have custom alert definitions, you will have to recreate them manually. It was not worth investing time in such feature at this stage, as custom alerts are rare and even if encountered, there us just a handful, that can be moved manually.
2. Only email notification actions are supported – because they are the most common. If you use other actions, like SNMP traps, let me know and maybe I will include them in the next version.

PowerCLI cmdlets used

These are some of the useful VMware PowerCLI cmdlets I used to write the script:

• Get-AlarmDefinition
• Get-AlarmAction
• Get-AlarmActionTrigger
• New-AlarmAction
• New-AlarmActionTrigger

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Quick Way to Migrate VMs Between Standalone ESXi Hosts

Introduction

Since vSphere 5.1, VMware offers an easy migration path for VMs running on hosts managed by a vCenter. Using Enhanced vMotion available in Web Client, VMs can be migrated between hosts, even if they don’t have shared datastores. In vSphere 6.0 cross vCenter vMotion(xVC-vMotion) was introduced, which no longer requires you to even have old and new hosts be managed by the same vCenter.

But what if you don’t have a vCenter and you need to move VMs between standalone ESXi hosts? There are many tools that can do that. You can use V2V conversion in VMware Converter or replication feature of the free version of Veeam Backup and Replication. But probably the easiest tool to use is OVF Tool.

Tool Overview

OVF Tool has been around since Open Virtualization Format (OVF) was originally published in 2008. It’s constantly being updated and the latest version 4.2.0 supports vSphere up to version 6.5. The only downside of the tool is it can export only shut down VMs. It’s may cause problems for big VMs that take long time to export, but for small VMs the tool is priceless.

Installation

OVF Tool is a CLI tool that is distributed as an MSI installer and can be downloaded from VMware web site. One important thing to remember is that when you’re migrating VMs, OVF Tool is in the data path. So make sure you install the tool as close to the workload as possible, to guarantee the best throughput possible.

Usage Examples

After the tool is installed, open Windows command line and change into the tool installation directory. Below are three examples of the most common use cases: export, import and migration.

Exporting VM as an OVF image:

> ovftool “vi://username:password@source_host/vm_name” “vm_name.ovf”

Importing VM from an OVF image:

> ovftool -ds=”destination_datastore” “vm_name.ovf” “vi://username:password@destination_host”

Migrating VM between ESXi hosts:

> ovftool -ds=”destination_datastore” “vi://username:password@source_host/vm_name” “vi://username:password@destination_host”

When you are migrating, machine the tool is running on is still used as a proxy between two hosts, the only difference is you are not saving the OVF image to disk and don’t need disk space available on the proxy.

This is what it looks like in vSphere and HTML5 clients’ task lists:

Observations

When planning migrations using OVF Tool, throughput is an important consideration, because migration requires downtime.

OVF Tool is quite efficient in how it does export/import. Even for thick provisioned disks it reads only the consumed portion of the .vmdk. On top of that, generated OVF package is compressed.

Due to compression, OVF Tool is typically bound by the speed of ESXi host’s CPU. In the screenshot below you can see how export process takes 1 out of 2 CPU cores (compression is singe-threaded).

While testing on a 2 core Intel i5, I was getting 25MB/s read rate from disk and an average export throughput of 15MB/s, which is roughly equal to 1.6:1 compression ratio.

For a VM with a 100GB disk, that has 20GB of space consumed, this will take 20*1024/25 = 819 seconds or about 14 minutes, which is not bad if you ask me. On a Xeon CPU I expect throughput to be even higher.

Caveats

There are a few issues that you can potentially run into that are well-known, but I think are still worth mentioning here.

Special characters in URIs (string starting with vi://) must be escaped. Use % followed by the character HEX code. You can find character HEX codes here: http://www.techdictionary.com/ascii.html.

For example use “vi://root:P%40ssword@10.0.1.10”, instead of “vi://root:P@ssword@10.0.1.10” or you can get confusing errors similar to this:

Error: Could not lookup host: root

Disconnect ISO images from VMs before migrating them or you will get the following error:

Error: A general system error occurred: vim.fault.FileNotFound

Conclusion

OVF Tool requires downtime when exporting, importing or migrating VMs, which can be a deal-breaker for large scale migrations. When downtime is not a concern or for VMs that are small enough for the outage to be minimal, from now on OVF Tool will be my migration tool of choice.

First Look at AWS Management Portal for vCenter Part 2: Administration

In part 1 of the series we looked at the Management Portal deployment. Let’s move on to an overview of the portal functionality.

Portal Dashboard

Once you open the portal you are asked to pick your region (region preferences can later be changed only from Web Client). You then proceed to the dashboard where you can see all instances you already have running in AWS. If you don’t see your VPCs, make sure the user you’re using to log in is on the list of administrators in AMP (user and domain names are case sensitive).

Here you can find detailed configuration information of each instance (Summary page), performance metrics (pulled from CloudWatch) and do some simple tasks, such as stopping/rebooting/terminating an instance, creating an AMI (Amazon Machine Image). You can also generate a Windows password from a key pair if you need to connect to VM via RDP or SSH.

Virtual Private Cloud Configuration

If the dashboard tab is more operational-focused, VPC tab is configuration-centric. Here you can create new VPCs, subnets and security groups. This can be handy if you want to add a rule to a security group to for instance allow RDP access to AWS instances from a certain IP.

If you spend most of the time in vCenter this can be helpful as you don’t need to go to AWS console every time to perform such simple day to day tasks.

Virtual Machine Provisioning

Portal supports simple instance provisioning from Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You start with creating an environment (Default Environment can’t be used to deploy new instances). Then you create a template, where you can pick an AMI and specify configuration options, such as instance type, subnets and security groups.

Note: when creating a template, make sure to search for AMIs by AMI ID. AMI IDs in quick start list are not up-to-date and will cause instance deployment to fail with the following error:

Failed to launch instance due to EC2 error: The specified AMI is no longer available or you are not authorized to use it.

You can then go ahead and deploy an instance from a template.

Virtual Machine Migration

Saving the best for the last. VM migration – this is probably one of the coolest portal features. Right-click on a VM in vCenter inventory and select Migrate to EC2. You will be asked where you want to place the VM and how AWS instance should be configured.

When you hit the button AMP will first export VM as an OVF image and then upload the image to AWS. As a result, you get a copy of your VM in AWS VPC with minimal effort.

When it comes to VM migration to AWS, there is, of course, much more to it than just copying the data. Machine gets a new SID, which not all applications and services like. There are compatibility considerations, data gravity, network connectivity and others. But all the heavy lifting AMP does for you.

Conclusion

I can’t say that I was overly impressed with the tool, it’s very basic and somewhat limited. Security Groups can be created, but cannot be applied to running instances. Similarly, templates can be created, but not edited.

But I would still recommend to give it a go. Maybe you will find it useful in your day to day operations. It gives you visibility into your AWS environment, saving time jumping between two management consoles. And don’t underestimate the migration feature. Where other vendors ask for a premium, AWS Management Portal for vCenter gives it to you for free.

First Look at AWS Management Portal for vCenter Part 1: Deployment

Cloud has been a hot topic in IT for quite a while, for such valid reasons and benefits it brings as agility and economies of scale. More and more customers start to embark on the cloud journey, whether it’s DR to cloud, using cloud as a Tier 3 storage or even full production migrations for the purpose of shrinking the physical data center footprint.

Even though full data center migrations to cloud are not that uncommon, many customers use cloud for certain use cases and keep other more static workloads on-premises, where it may be more cost-effective. What it means is that they end up having two environments, that they have to manage separately. This introduces complexity into operational models as each environment has its own management tools.

Overview

AWS Management Portal for vCenter helps to bridge this gap by connecting your on-premises vSphere environment to AWS and letting you perform basic management tasks, such as creating VPCs and security groups, deploying EC2 instances from AMI templates and even migrating VMs from vSphere to cloud, all without leaving the familiar vCenter user interface.

Solution consists of two components: AWS Management Portal for vCenter, which is configured in AWS and AWS Connector for vCenter, which is a Linux appliance deployed on-prem. Let’s start with the management portal first.

Configure Management Portal

AWS Management Portal for vCenter or simply AMP, can be accessed by the following link https://amp.aws.amazon.com. Configuration is wizard-based and its main purpose is to set up authentication for vCenter users to be able to access AWS cloud through the portal.

You have an option of either using SAML, which has pre-requisites, or simply choosing the connector to be your authentication provider, which is the easiest option.

If you choose the latter, you will need to pre-configure a trust relationship between AWS Connector and the portal. First step of the process is to create an Identity and Access Management (IAM) user in AWS Management Console and assign “AWSConnector” IAM policy to it (connector will then use this account to authenticate to AWS). This step is explained in detail in Option 1: Federation Authentication Proxy section of the AWS Management Portal for vCenter User Guide.

You will also be asked to specify vCenter accounts that will have access to AWS and to generate an AMP-Connector Key. Save your IAM account Access Key / Secret and AMP-Connector Key. You will need them in AWS Connector registration wizard.

Configure AWS Connector

AWS Connector is distributed as an OVA, which you can download here:

• https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-connector/AWS-Connector.ova

To assign a static IP address to the appliance you will need to open VM console and log in as ec2-user with the password ec2pass. Run the setup script and change network settings as desired. Connector also supports connecting to AWS through a proxy if required.

# sudo setup.rb

Browse to the appliance IP address to link AWS Connector to your vCenter and set up appliance’s password. You will then be presented with the registration wizard.

Wizard will ask you to provide a service account for AWS Connector (create a non-privileged domain account for it) and credentials of the IAM trust account you created previously. You will also need your trust role’s ARN (not user’s ARN) which you can get from the AMP-Connector Federation Proxy section of AWS Management Portal for vCenter setup page.

If everything is done correctly, you will get to the plug-in registration page with the configuration summary, which will look similar to this:

Summary

AWS Connector will register a vCenter plug-in, which you will see both in vSphere client and Web Client.

That completes the deployment part. In the next blog post of the series we will talk in more detail on how AWS Management Portal can be leveraged to manage VPCs and EC2 instances.