About two years ago I have written a blog post describing how service provider (with cloud based on vCloud Director) can replace hardware without tenants actually noticing this. The provider can stand up new vSphere cluster with new hardware and migrate whole Provider VDC to it with running virtual machines. In my mind this is one of the distinguishing features from other cloud management systems.
Recently I had an opportunity to test this in large environment with vCloud Director 5.5 and would like to report how it is even more simplified compared to vCloud Director 5.1 which the former post was based on. No more API calls are needed and everything can be done from vCloud Administrator GUI in the following five steps:
- Prepare new cluster and create new provider VDC on it.
- Merge it with the old provider VDC. Disable its resource pool(s).
![Merge PVDCs]()
- Migrate all VMs from the old resource pool to the new one in vCloud Director (not in vSphere!!!)
![Migrate VMs]()
- Redeploy all Edge Gateways running on the old hardware.
- Detach the old resource pool.
![Detaching Resource Pool]()
While the first 4 steps are identical as in vCloud Director 5.1 the step 5 is where the simplification is. The last step takes care of both migration of catalog templates and deletion of shadow VMs.
As before this is possible only with Elastic VDCs (Pay-As-You-Go or Elastic Allocation Pool).
