White Paper
Onboarding VMs to Cisco Metapod
This white paper will explain the process for exporting existing virtual machines from
either VMware vSphere or AWS EC2 into Cisco Metapod™. This process is fairly
straightforward and customers can migrate workloads by simply using the inherent
tools and capabilities of Metapod, 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 Metapod, this white paper will discuss the following topics:
●
Introduction of Metapod
●
Supported Images in Metapod
●
Export VMware VM to Metapod
●
Export AWS EC2 VM to Metapod
●
VM format conversion
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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Introduction
Cisco Metapod 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. Metapod 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, Metapod offers an alternative OpenStack platform
for suitable workloads. In other words, migration to Metapod 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 Metapod onboarding. However, in many cases the customer can easily export suitable
virtual machine workloads from either VMware or AWS to a managed Metapod 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. Metapod 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 Metapod 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 Metapod
The process of migrating a virtual machine running Microsoft Windows or Linux guest operating systems from
VMware to Metapod 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 Metapod 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
Metapod using the enhanced dashboard option.
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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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 Metapod 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 Metapod
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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 Metapod
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 Metapod 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 Metapod 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 Metapod section to upload image into Metapod 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 Metapod 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
Metapod 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, Metapod 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 Metapod, or contact your local account representative.
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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10/11
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