vCloud Director Extender 1.0.0.1 Release Notes

vCloud Director Extender 1.0.0.1 | 1 FEB 2018 | Build 7713291 Check for additions and updates to these release notes.

What's in the Release Notes

These release notes cover the following topics:

• About vCloud Director Extender
• Operational Limits
• Supported Browsers
• Resolved Issue
• Known Issues

About vCloud Director Extender

VMware vCloud Director Extender enables a hybrid cloud between an end user’s data center and a cloud provider data center backed by vCloud Director. With vCloud Director Extender, you can perform simple VM migrations and DC Network Extensions.

Simplified Setup

Administrators can install and configure vCloud Director Extender by deploying the vCloud Director Extender appliance and running the standalone Setup UI.

Seamless Migration and Hybrid Cloud Experience for Tenants

For on-premise vCenter Server deployments, vCloud Director Extender provides an integrated user interface designed as a vCenter Server Plug-in. Through this plug-in, users can manage migration of VMs and extension of L2 VPN networks

Cold and Warm Migration

vCloud Director Extender supports two types of migrations.

• Cold migration transfers the VMDK files of the source virtual machine to the target virtual machines.
• Warm migration starts a continuous file synchronization while the source virtual machines are in a powered-on state. When the migration is complete a manual cutover is performed to make the virtual machines available.

Migration over Internet

vCloud Director uses a built-in TLS encryption for migration over the Internet. This type of migration does not require a VPN connection.

Flexible Migration Options

You can migrate several virtual machines in a single task, schedule future jobs or power on the virtual machines after cutover.

Simplified Layer 2 DC Extension

With vCloud Director Extender, you can configure L2 VPN tunnels between the on-premise vCenter Server and the edge gateways in the vCloud Director cloud provider environment. NSX Manager is optional for the on-premise deployment, however vCloud Director Extender includes the VMware NSX for vSphere Standalone Edge - Client 6.3.0 and provides a user interface for the setup and configuration. For more information on NSX Standalone Edge, see NSX for vSphere 6.3.0 Release Notes. You can also use vCloud Director Extender with an on-premise NSX Manager through a managed NSX edge. vCloud Director Extender also supports egress exit optimization.

Monitoring Capabilities

With vCloud Director Extender you can perform different tasks and monitor the progress of each one.

• Home dashboard for monitoring the health status of migration tasks, the status and the throughput of the L2 VPN tunnel.
• Status and progress of a migration task per virtual machine and per job.
• Log forwarding of the system log to external syslog servers.

Operational Limits

The following operational limits are discovered through rigorous testing of different migration scenarios. 

Number of Deployments

vCloud Director Extender can scale up to 20 vCloud Director Extender On-Premise Appliances, each one of them installed on a separate on-premise vCenter Server 6.0 or 6.5 instance, and a single Replication Manager installed in the service provider site.

Warm Migration

• You can migrate up to 10 virtual machines in one or more jobs from on-premise vCenter Server to cloud provider.
• You can migrate up to 50 virtual machines from on-premises vCenter Server to cloud provider when initiated from cloud provider.

Cold Migration

• You can migrate up to 10 virtual machines in one or more jobs from on-premises vCenter Server.
• You can migrate up to 50 virtual machines from on-premise vCenter Server to cloud provider when initiated from cloud provider.

DC Network Extensions

The following operational limits are discovered by performing DC Network Extensions on a standard switch.

• You can perform up to 15 L2 VPN network extensions from a single on-premises vCenter Server to a single cloud provider.

For more information, see the vCloud Director Extender 1.0 User's Guide.

Supported Browsers

The vCloud Director Extender is compatible with the following Web browsers.

• Google Chrome 
• Mozilla Firefox 

Resolved Issues

• Configuring vCloud Director Extender fails if the name of any of the vCenter Server resource clusters, hosts, virtual datacenters contains a space character in their name, or if the names follow the down-level logon name format.

  After deploying the vCloud Director Extender Virtual Appliance, you cannot complete the Setup Wizard if the name of a resource cluster, a host, or a virtual datacenter in the vCenter Server environment contains a space character or follows the down-level logon name format (DOMAIN\name). The vCloud Director Extender Setup Wizard fails with an ERROR: Locator does not refer to an object error message.

  This issue is now resolved.

• Migration of virtual machines does not support a clustered datastore.

  If you configure vCloud Director Extender to use a storage policy associated with a datastore cluster for a migration task, the migration fails with a FATAL - The configured target Environment does not have any VC configured. error message.

  This issue is now resolved.

Known Issues

The known issues are grouped as follows.

• General Issues
• Installation and Configuration Issues

General Issues

• Virtual machine migration fails due to insufficient privileges 

  Migrating virtual machines to the target organization fails if the role of the user who triggered the migration is different from organization administrator.

  Workaround: Only user accounts that are organization administrators can start migration jobs.

• A delta synchronization starts simultaneously with the initial synchronization regardless of the recovery point objective (RPO) value

  This issue occurs when you perform a warm migration job with all values set to default, except for the RPO. You can increase the RPO value to up to 60 minutes and, when the initial synchronization is in progress, you receive an error message:

  vSphere Replication operation error. Cannot start a Delta because a Full sync is already in progress
  

  Workaround: None. This synchronization error is benign and does not impact the migration job.

• The IP pool for configuring an L2 Аppliance is limited

  There is an IP pool limit for configuring the the L2 Аppliance. For example, if you add three IP addresses in the Setup UI and stretch three networks at the same time to consume the IP addresses, the IP pool for the Setup UI is empty.

  Workaround: By design, an IP address returns to the IP pool when the edge and DC Extensions are deleted.

• The vCloud Director Extender Plug-in may not be visible in the vSphere 6.5 Client (HTML5)

  After you install and configure vCloud Director Extender, the vCloud Director Extender plug-in might not be available in the Home tab of the vSphere 6.5 Client (HTML5).

  Workaround: You can work around this error by registering the plug-in again and rebooting the vCenter Server Web Client service.

• The VPN tunnel throughput for outbound traffic is not updated in the DC Extensions status bar.

  When you configure a DC Network Extension successfully and issue a ping path between the on-premise vCenter Server and the cloud provider, the status value of the outbound packet does not update accordingly.

  Workaround: None.

• The network performance is limited due to the type of the network adapter

  You might experience a degraded network performance due to the default type of network adapter used for deploying Replication Manager and Replicator.

  Workaround: To work around this issue you must log in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator, power off the appliance, change the type of the network adapter to vmxnet3, and power on the appliance.

• A rescheduled migration job starts with a delay​ 

  When you schedule a migration to run at a specific date and time and after that reschedule it to run immediately, the job does not start immediately and the job status appears with the initial date and time schedule in the Workload tab.

  Workaround: None

• Ending a migration job after failure may result in VMDK files not getting cleaned up.

  When you run a migration job and it fails, you might experiance a clean up failure of the VMDK files due to that. 
  The Resource vCenter Server datastore might fill up with temporary VMDK files.

  Workaround: You can prevent the datastore from filling up by cleaning up the temporary VMDK files.

  1. Log in to the Resource vCenter Server as an administrator and locate the data store on which the VMDK files are copied.
  2. Delete the VMDK files and all the associated files.
  3. Log in to the on-premise ESXi and disable the replication for virtual machines. For more information, seе https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2093264 
  4. Log in to the Replication Manager component as an administrator and run the following commands:
  • h4 -u vsphere_admin_user -p password login
  • h4 replications
  • h4 stop replicaiton_id
• Home dashboard for monitoring the health status of migration tasks, the status and the throughput of the L2 VPN Tunnel is showing incorrect data

  The L2 Tunnel throughput data on the monitoring home dashboard is showing incorrect information due to a known limitations of NSX.

  Workаround: The Tunnel throughput data should be ignored.

Installation and Configuration Issues

• When using an external Platform Services Controller, the registration fails

  When you deploy a vCloud Director Extender On-Premise Appliance, in the the OnPrem Setup UI, you must enter the SSO URL (Lookup Service) information. This field is mandatory if you use an external Platform Services Controller (PSC). If you leave the field empty, you receive an error message.

  Error Code 500 Exception thrown while fetching the MTA client from the agent cache.

  Workaround: None. For users using external PSC the Lookup Service is a mandatory field. 

• The vCloud Director Extender Plug-In and its version are not available in the vCenter Server plug-ins page of the vCenter Server Client

  When you register the vCloud Director Extender plug-in with a vCenter Server instance using the vCenter Plugin Registration tab instead of the Setup Wizard, vCloud Director Extender UI does show a confirmation message for a successful registration. The registered plug-in is not listed in the vCenter plug-ins page and the version number is not displayed. You must increment the version number for the subsequent configuration.

  Workaround: You can work around this issue by identifying the correct version of the installed plug-in from the vCenter Server Managed Object Browser (MOB) and registering the plug-in again.