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White Paper

Onboarding VMs to Cisco Metacloud

This white paper will explain the process for exporting existing virtual machines from either VMware vSphere or AWS EC2 into Cisco Metacloud™. This process is fairly straightforward and customers can migrate workloads by simply using the inherent tools and capabilities of Metacloud, VMware, and AWS, respectfully. The assumption is that the reader should have a baseline understanding of the vCenter management console as well as the AWS console and EC2 API command line.

In order to provide a baseline understanding of the process to export an existing virtual machine workload to a new Cisco Metacloud, this white paper will discuss the following topics:

● Introduction of Metacloud

● Supported Images in Metacloud

● Export VMware VM to Metacloud

● Export AWS EC2 VM to Metacloud

● VM format conversion

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Introduction Cisco Metacloud delivers a true public cloud experience for customers on their premises and behind their own firewall. It offers full administrative control and multi-tenancy. It’s a production-ready, OpenStack-based solution that Cisco engineers, deploys, upgrades, and remotely operates on the customer’s behalf, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This managed OpenStack distribution allows our customers to deliver IT as a service to their LOBs as if the IT department were their own public cloud provider. Metacloud is truly the OpenStack easy button!

After Cisco deploys the new managed OpenStack cloud, the customer is provided with an enhanced Horizon dashboard that includes tools and wizards to ease the onboarding of virtual machines.

For customers who are interested in migrating existing virtual machines with Windows or Linux guest operating systems from brownfield virtualized data centers or public cloud, Metacloud offers an alternative OpenStack platform for suitable workloads. In other words, migration to Metacloud is an option for any workload supported in OpenStack. In those regards, Cisco cloud migration services or ecosystem partners can provide professional services for the purpose of large scale Metacloud onboarding. However, in many cases the customer can easily export suitable virtual machine workloads from either VMware or AWS to a managed Metacloud without assistance.

The remainder of this white paper will document the included tools and features that a customer can utilize to export virtual machines from the exiting virtual machine mangers (VMMs) and APIs to OpenStack.

Migrating from VMware or AWS virtual machines to a managed OpenStack cloud is compelling for customers who are concerned with their IT department’s ability to support the day to day operational aspects of the cloud hypervisor while trying to foster innovation in applications or other high priority aspects of IT. Metacloud allows IT to focus on using the cloud and rapid delivery of applications versus the operational aspects of the underlying OpenStack controllers, hypervisors, and storage.

Supported Images Currently Metacloud supports the following virtual machine formats and image types available to tenants to either migrate an existing virtual machine, or to spawn a new virtual machine instance in an OpenStack project:

● ISO (International Standards Organization) image

● VHD (Virtual Hard Disk)

● QCOW2 (QEMU Copy On Write)

● RAW

● AMI (Amazon Machine Image)

● VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk)

Export VMware to Metacloud The process of migrating a virtual machine running Microsoft Windows or Linux guest operating systems from VMware to Metacloud is straightforward. Both vSphere client to an ESXi host and vCenter can be used to export OVF templates of the VM instance from VMware to Metacloud using VMDK.

The following steps explain how to export an existing VMware virtual machine by using vSphere client from an ESXi host or from vCenter and then use the OVF and VMDK files to launch the virtual machine as an instance in Metacloud using the enhanced dashboard option.

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Figure 1. Step (1) – Shut down VM

Figure 2. Step (2) – Export OVF Template

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Figure 3. Step (3) – Save OVF Template locally

Figure 4. Step (4) – Create new Image in Metacloud from OVF file

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Figure 5. Step (5) – Open OVF folder on local PC from the previous VMware export and select the VMDK file

Figure 6. Step (6) – Launch new instance of exported VMware virtual machine in Metacloud

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Figure 7. Step (7) – Configure OpenStack hardware and policy resources required for the instance

Figure 8. Step (8) – Launch instance and select the console to configure any needed changes to the guest operating system, such as static IP addresses etc.

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Export AWS to Metacloud The import/export functions of AWS are part of the EC2 API Tools that can be downloaded here:

The export function of this tool can only migrate VMs from the Amazon cloud in VMDK or VHD formats aimed at their respective ESXi and Hyper-V or XenServer formats. Currently export only works for Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008 EC2 instances. Amazon Web Services utilizes a custom kernel on their Linux images, which makes exporting the entire virtual machine and importing it directly into Metacloud impossible. However, there are several workarounds with using other free tools (e.g., Packer) that allow you to import a Windows or Linux VM image into AWS to support exporting it later. Also as a more tedious option, you can create a new instance of the workload on Metacloud and migrate application and data base data between VMs.

Please note that the EC2 API import/export function is free, while the storage that you use on the S3 storage during the migration process in not free.

Detailed instructions for using EC2 API CLI to export images here:

Basic Instructions: Step (1): Install AWS EC2 API CLI tools on local device (see above)

Step (2): Create an Amazon S3 bucket (see link to detailed instructions above)

Step (3): Export “supported” EC2 image (see compatibility above)

At a command prompt, type the following command:

ec2-create-instance-export-task instance_id –e target_environment –f disk_image_format -c container_format –b s3_bucket

instance_id

The ID of the instance you want to export.

target_environment

VMware, Citrix, or Microsoft.

disk_image_format

VMDK for VMware or VHD for Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen.

container_format

Optionally set to OVA when exporting to VMware.

s3_bucket

The name of the Amazon S3 bucket to which you want to export the instance.

Step (4): Repeat steps (4-7) in previous VMware to Metacloud section to upload image into Metacloud and launch a new running instance from the enhanced dashboard or API.

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Conversion Once images are exported from the originating hypervisor they can be optionally converted within OpenStack using the qemu-img convert command from the CLI.

The qemu-img convert command can do conversion between multiple formats, including qcow2, QED, raw, VDI (VirtualBox), VHD (Hyper-V), and VMDK (VMware).

Table 1. qemu-img format strings

qcow2 (KVM, Xen) qcow2

QED (KVM) Qed

raw Raw

VDI (VirtualBox) Vdi

VHD (Hyper-V) Vpc

VMDK (VMware) vmdk

This example will convert a raw image file named centos7.img to a qcow2 image file.

$ qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 centos7.img centos7.qcow2

Run the following command to convert a VMDK image file to a raw image file.

$ qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw centos7.vmdk centos7.img

Run the following command to convert a VMDK image file to a qcow2 image file.

$ qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 centos7.vmdk centos7.qcow2

Unified CLI In order to access the CLI, every Metacloud install comes with pre-installed instances complete with all the tools. These powerful and scriptable command line tools give you complete flexibility to manage all your cloud resources.

Conclusion Metacloud offers tools and support for importing and exporting virtual machine images to and from most hypervisor platforms. In order to make this process easy for our customers, Metacloud supports both an enhanced dashboard and CLI option for onboarding workloads. The intention is to make migrating or instantiating virtual machines easy, as to allow customers to focus on using their OpenStack clouds and deploying applications rapidly.

For More Information Read more about Cisco Metacloud, or contact your local account representative.

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