With vCloud Director Extender, you can migrate your virtual machines from an on-premise vCenter Server to a cloud provider environment. You can migrate virtual machines both when they are powered on and powered off depending on the available downtime.
You can initiate virtual machines migration jobs only from a tenant vCenter Server on-premise. With vCloud Director Extender migration jobs, tenants can preserve their current IP and MAC address scheme after the migration completes.
Preserving IP and MAC address scheme after a migration is only possible, if you extend a private, on-premise, virtual network to cloud VDC networks by using the DC Extension feature of vCloud Director Extender.
Migration of an entire data center is a slow process and is often done in stages. To ensure a minimal downtime of client applications, vCloud Director Extender provides flexibility in the different types of migrations.
You can choose from two types of migration.
With Warm Migration, you can keep your virtual machines active while the migration runs, and ensure minimal downtime. After the migration completes, you start a manual Cutover to make the virtual machines available on the cloud provider site and finalize the migration. Cutover is a process of powering on the virtual machines at the cloud provider site, after the warm migration completes. The Cutover operation includes a final sync and import of a migrated VM into a destination Org VDC's vApp and an optional powering on of the VM.
With Cold Migration, you power off your virtual machines and start the migration. No cutover process is required in this case, you can select whether to power on the virtual machines from the migration setup menu.
During the Migration lifecycle, a migration goes through various states. The following table can help you understand vCloud Director Extender migration states.
State |
Description |
|---|---|
CREATED |
Initial state that indicates that a migration is started. |
INITIAL SYNC IN PROGRESS |
An initial full sync is in progress. Information is being transferred from the source on-premise to the target cloud environment. |
INITIAL SYNC COMPLETED |
The initial full sync is completed successfully. |
CREATINGVM |
A VM is being created in the cloud resource vCenter Server. This is the migration state after a cold migration, or when a cutover operations is started. |
CREATEVM_COMPLETED |
A VM is successfully created in the cloud resource vCenter Server. |
IMPORTINGVM |
A VM is migrated to the cloud resource vCenter Server and is being imported to vCloud Director. |
IMPORTVM_COMPLETED |
VM is successfully imported to the target vCloud Director. |
CANCELED |
The migration is canceled. No data is sent to the cloud. |
SUSPENDED |
The migration is suspended. You can manually resume operation. |
IMPORTVM_FAILED |
Importing the VM to vCloud Director failed. |
CREATEVM_FAILED |
Creating a VM in the cloud environment failed. |
