Requirements

The VMs with the following configurations are not supported by Nutanix Xtract.

• Guest OSes not supported by AHV (see Supported Guest VM Types for AHV in the Nutanix Support Portal)
• VM names with non-English characters
• Custom vCenter ports
• Selecting individual ESXi hosts as source of VMs
• PCIE pass-through (only certain devices)
• Independent disks
• Physical RDM based disks
• VMs with multi-writer disks attached
• VMs with 2 GB sparse disk attached
• VMs with SCSI controllers with a SCSI bus sharing attached

Following operating system are fully supported:

• Windows 2016 Standard, 2016 Datacenter
• Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10
• Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016
• CentOS 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
• Ubuntu 12.04.5, 14.04.x, 16.04.x, 16.10, Server, Desktop (32-bit and 64-bit)
• FreeBSD 9.3, 10.0, 10.1,10.2, 10.3, 11.0
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3 / SP4
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Oracle Linux 6.x, 7.x
• RHEL 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3

Following operating system are partially supported:

• Windows 32-bit operating systems
• Windows with UAC enabled
• RHEL 4.0, 5.x
• CentOS Linux 4.0, 5.x
• Ubuntu 12.x or lower
• VMs using UEFI-VMs requiring PCI or IDE bus

The following configurations are required by Nutanix Xtract:

• Supported browsers: Google Chrome
• VMware Tools must be installed and up to date on the guest VMs for migration
• Virtual hardware version running on a VM must be 7.0 minimum.
• Source VMs must support Changed Block Tracking (CBT). See https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1020128
• CBT-based snapshots are supported for certain VMs.
• Disks must be either sparse or flat format and must have a minimum version of 2.
• ESXi version must be 5.5 minimum.
• Hosts must not be in maintenance mode.
• vCenter reachable from Xtract appliance on Port TCP 443.
• ESXi hosts reachable from Xtract appliance on Ports TCP 443 and TCP 902.
• Every VM must have a UUID.
• ESXi hosts must be have complete configuration details of the VMs.
• Complete VM configuration details in ESXi.
• VMs must have multiple compatible snapshots.
• Allow port 2049 and port 111 between the Xtract for VM network and the AHV cluster network (CVMs).
• Accounts used for performing in-guest operations require Login as Batch Job rights in the local security policy on Windows or within the group policy, see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc957131.aspx. Administrator users do not have sufficient rights.

Before a migration, the VMware tools must be started and running and the snapshots must be deleted

Deploy Nutanix Xtract

First of all, download the appliance image from the Nutanix portal. Then log on Nutanix Xtract and navigate to Home |VM.

Next click on the wheel and select Image Configuration.

Then click on Create Image, specify a name and an annotation. Choose Disk image type and upload the qcow2 file from the Nutanix Xtract that you have previously downloaded.

The image upload take a moment and you can check the progression in task menu.

Then create a VM with the following settings:

• 2 vCPUs
• 2 Cores per vCPU
• 4GB of Memory

If you scroll down to Disks setting, you’ll get this message. Click on Add New Disk.

Configure the disk as the following and select the Nutanix Xtract image you’ve just uploaded. Then click on Add.

In Network Adapters section, specify the VLAN where will be connected Nutanix Xtract.

To finish, enable Custom Script and upload the script called xtract-vm-cloudinit-script located in the Nutanix Xtract archival that you have previously downloaded from Nutanix portal.

Then start the VM, connect to the console and wait a while. From my side, the appliance was ready after 30 minutes.

Configure the appliance

When the appliance is ready, you can enter admin credentials (admin / nutanix/4u).

When you are logged with admin user, run the rs command and type again the admin password.

Edit the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and specify a static IP as below configuration.

Then restart the service network by running service network restart.

Next edit the file /etc/resolv.conf and specify your suffix DNS and the DNS server(s):

• search mydomain.local
• nameserver 10.10.201.2

Restart the Nutanix Xtract appliance. Now connect through HTTPS to the appliance by using the static IP you have set previously. Accept the license agreement and click on Continue.

Next specify a password for the nutanix account.

Now you can log on Nutanix Xtract with the nutanix account.

Configure Nutanix Xtract

Now that you are connected to the appliance, you have to add the source and the target environment. First click on Add Source environment.

Then enter the source name, the vCenter Server address and admin credentials.

Next click on Add target environment and specify your Nutanix Prism.

Now you have the source and the target environment. You are ready to migrate VMware VM to Nutanix AHV.

Migrate a VMware VM to Nutanix AHV

Now to migrate VMs, we have to create a migration plan. To create it, click on Create a Migration Plan.

Provide a name for the migration plan and click on OK.

Next select the target environment and the target container where you want to store VMs.

Next you can look for VMs you want to migrate by using the search field. Then click on the “+” button to add VM into the migration plan.

The guest credentials are used if you run guest operations on source VMs such as install the VirtIO tools. I recommend to not bypass Guest Operations on Source VMs to install VirtIO automatically. Lot of VMs I have migrated without these operations didn’t boot. You can also make the mapping between the source network and the target network.

Next check the migration plan summary and click on Save And Start to run immediately the migration. The data will be copied but the cutover will be done manually later.

Then you can monitor the migration progression.

When you are ready to cutover the VM, you can click on Cutover. The source VMs will be shutdown and the target VMs will be started. I final incremental data copy is executed.

When the copy is finished, the migration status should be completed. Congratulation, you have migrated VMware VMs to Nutanix AHV easily :).

Conclusion

Nutanix provides a powerful tool to migrate VMware VM to Nutanix AHV. All is included to plan the migration and you can schedule the failover. I had some issue with Microsoft UAC but globally the tool works great.

The post Migrate VMs from VMware to Nutanix AHV with Nutanix Xtract appeared first on Tech-Coffee.

The following procedure regards Nutanix blocks. If you have a branded block (such as Dell), the procedure may change especially about network adapter to plug.

I’m sorry, the screenshots are blurred. I promise, I’ll do better next time

Requirements

To re-image Nutanix nodes, you need Nutanix foundation that you can download from Nutanix portal. This is a VM provided by Nutanix which contains tools to re-image node. This VM should be run on your laptop so you need a hypervisor which can run this VM such as VMware Workstation or VirtualBox.

I heavily recommend you to bring a simple switch (no manageable, 8 ports) to plug your laptop and Nutanix nodes. In this way nothing will trouble the deployment. The node discovering is based on IPv6LL.

You need also the lastest AOS release (5.1.3 at the time of writing this topic) and the VMware ESXi 6.5u1 ISO. To summary you need:

• A laptop with VMware Workstation/Fusion, VirtualBox
• Download the Foundation VM, add it to the hypervisor you chose and start it
• A non-manageable switch 8 ports
• Download the last AOS from the Nutanix Portal
• Download VMware ESXi 6.5u1

About foundation VM

Once you have downloaded the foundation VM, you can unzip it and add it to the hypervisor on your laptop. The VM must be connected to a bridge network. Be sure about this configuration. The default credentials are Nutanix / nutanix/4u.

About Nutanix nodes

The Nutanix nodes must be connected to the switch where your laptop is plugged. From my side, I have plugged the lower integrated network adapter port (Nutanix brand block). This configuration can change depending on the block brand. For example, for Lenovo blocks, I read that 1GB and 10GB network adapter must be plugged. For other, you need to plug also the IPMI. Please read the documentation for branded block about the right connection for re-imaging.

About network

Each Nutanix node requires four (three mandatory) IP addresses:

• One for IPMI
• One for Hypervisor (management)
• One for Controller VM (CVM)
• vMotion (Optional but recommended)

It is recommended that the CVM network and the Hypervisor network were on the same subnet. An additional IP is required for the cluster address.

Re-image Nutanix Node

Once the Foundation VM is started and you are authenticated to the system, you should get the following desktop. Run the script set_foundation_ip_address.

Choose Device configuration. Then set an IP address which will be on the hypervisor network to reach the cluster and the nodes.

Next I use a tool like PSCP to copy inside the VM the AOS and VMware image. To copy files, run the following command:

Pscp.exe c:\path\to\my\file nutanix@<foundation VM IP address>:/tmp

Then run the Foundation Applet to open the following GUI. The interface shows you the discovered nodes. In this example, only two nodes are discovered instead of three, I don’t know why. I chose to click on a node and launch foundation.

By magic in foundation, the three nodes are well discovered. If your nodes are not discovered, you can specify the IPMI MAC address to discover nodes manually. A label is stuck on back of each node with the IPMI MAC address.

On the next screen, specify the cluster information: cluster name and IP address, NTP server, DNS server and time zone. I activate the checkbox Configure IPMI IP to configure IPMI of each node. Next, I choose a netmask and a gateway for CVM and hypervisor network. Finally, I changed the CVM memory to 32GB which is a recommended value when you enable deduplication.

Next for each node, specify the node name and an IP for each network.

In this example, I choose Single Hypervisor because I want to deploy the same hypervisor in each node.

On the next screen, click on manage in AOS section and upload the AOS image that you have copied previously in /tmp. Do the same thing for ESXi.

After upload is finished, you should have something like that:

PS: You can upgrade the hypervisor whitelist to install latest VMware ESXi version. For that, you need to connect to Nutanix portal and download the last ISO_WhiteList.json. Then use PSCP to copy the file in the Foundation VM. Next click on View Whitelist and update the whitelist with the file that you have just copied.

Then the re-imaging process is running. It took 2h to finish the re-imaging.

Once th re-imaging process is finished, the cluster is creating.

If the cluster is well created, you should get the following screen:

Connect to Prism from a web browser (https://<Cluster IP>) and complete requested information. You have to change the default password also.

Next choose to activate or not Pulse.

After the wizard, you should get the Prism dashboard with cluster information. Now you can configure Prism and deploy vCenter. Have fun

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