What is the status/roadmap of V2V (Migrating from VMware to XCPng/XO) ?
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Thanks for the details @florent
@florent said in What is the status/roadmap of V2V (Migrating from VMware to XCPng/XO) ?:
the newer VMFS put more lock on the files, locking the full chain of snapshot and base disks instead of locking only the active disk.
Even VMFS5 sometimes lock the full chain.That explains why I had locking issues trying to restart the source VM on vmware after a migration test.
I'll see if I can find anything on how to use NBD with vmware.
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Thanks @afk ! Your knowledge on the "other side" might be very helpful for us!
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@afk Have you found anything ?
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Hi @olivierlambert @florent ,
I didn't have much time to work on this in the last weeks but I finally could dig deeper thanks to the migratekit repo.
Essentially, they are delegating all the work to nbdkit and its vddk plugin (https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit and https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit-vddk-plugin.1.html) by spawning an external process (https://github.com/vexxhost/migratekit/blob/a08325d420733e4eb26331d87bf6ef46d8cccd7f/internal/nbdkit/builder.go#L82).
The authentication info is simply the authentication to vCenter/ESXi provided by the end-user if I'm not mistaken and the filename given to nbdkit is indeed gathered from the VirtualDeviceBackingInfo property. They are using the govmomi auto-generated library for this.
For instance, on a snapshot of one of our VMs:
You can see the property path at the top and the fileName property contains the "[datastore-name] filepath" string.
The "device[2000]" part of the path is from the list of devices attached to the VM that can also be accessed following the snapshot moref:
Migratekit is then filtering on the VirtualDisk type in the device list.
Now, the problem in this setup is that nbdkit is using VDDK directly, but the development kit cannot be redistributed without a licence agreement from Broadcom: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsphere/vsphere-sdks-tools/8-0/virtual-disk-development-kit-programming-guide/the-virtual-disk-api-and-vsphere/developing-for-vmware-platform-products/redistributing-vddk-components.html
The user would have to download and install VDDK manually.
I hope this helps and let me know if you need more details on all this. I played a bit with pyvmomi 5+ years ago but I never used the SOAP API "manually" though.
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Thanks, that's very useful info! @florent will take a look when he can!
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Has there been any progress/decision on the V2V improvements for recent vsphere versions ?
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@florent is working on various improvements yes.
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Great news ! Thanks @olivierlambert and @florent and let me know if you need some information on the vmware side.
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@afk said in What is the status/roadmap of V2V (Migrating from VMware to XCPng/XO) ?:
Great news ! Thanks @olivierlambert and @florent and let me know if you need some information on the vmware side.
yes we are prototyping with vddk , it should open some interesting possibilities. stay tuned, hopefully by the end of the summer (I am saying it again : for a prototype)
as a shameless plug, we are looking for users with VSAN to ensure we don't break thing for it
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@florent said in What is the status/roadmap of V2V (Migrating from VMware to XCPng/XO) ?:
@afk said in What is the status/roadmap of V2V (Migrating from VMware to XCPng/XO) ?:
Great news ! Thanks @olivierlambert and @florent and let me know if you need some information on the vmware side.
yes we are prototyping with vddk , it should open some interesting possibilities. stay tuned, hopefully by the end of the summer (I am saying it again : for a prototype)
as a shameless plug, we are looking for users with VSAN to ensure we don't break thing for it
If you need some beta tester we have a running XCP-ng PoC and need to challenge V2V process from VMware with many VMs on vSAN.
The lack of warm migration is a big issue for us since it would require a significant downtime to migrate some customers' VMs.
We also have NFS datastores that could help but our VMware infrastructure being managed by OVHcloud, we cannot have direct access to NFS to setup XOA remote (unless we just can't figure out the settings to put).
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@snk33 the vddk migration path is now far more than a Poc , and it gaves very good result but we are missing some key part to improve things on VSAN , since it's not too easy to setup and we are not a vmware shop
we would gladly work together if we an ensure warm migration can be made reliable even from VSAN.
How can we proceed ? If you have a xoa, would it be ok to allow us to use a tunnel so we can start a VM migration ad find the root cause ?
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@florent sorry I said PoC as reference to our XCP-ng pool cluster, not vddk migration process
Sure we've got a trial license to challenge the solution so we can open a tunnel on the XOA and eventually give some VMware credentials to make some migrations tests. We've got some non-critical VMs to make warm migrations tests on without impact.
Tunnel opened -> 35803
