In this second post about vCloud Director Extender, I’ll guide you through the necessary steps to configure the vCloud Director Extender Service from a Customer (Tenant) perspective.

vCloud Director Extender enables a Tenant to cold or warm migrate its workloads from vSphere to a vCloud Director based Public Cloud. All the easy steps are wizard-driven and the Tenant also has the option to leverage the automatic creation of a L2VPN connection that can stretch the networking between on premises and the vCloud Director Cloud.

You can read vCloud Director Extender release notes here.

vCloud Director Extender Tenant deployment

All the initial steps needed on the Tenant side are the same we’ve seen on the Service Provider side, first you download the vCloud Director Extender OVA file, then you deploy it in your source vCenter. See the Service Provider Setup paragraph in my previous post to view all the steps.
The only difference you must pay attention to is to choose “cx-connector” as the deployment type.

vCloud Director Extender Tenant configuration

Once deployed, you can access the vCloud Director Extender Virtual Appliance via https on the configured IP Address.
You will be presented with the OnPrem Setup page.
Enter your Local or vCenter (SSO) credentials to access the application and start the configuration wizard.

Select “SETUP WIZARD” to start the Service configuration.

In Step 1, you’ll enter the parameters needed to connect to the source vCenter. Then click “Next”.

Wait for the confirmation message, then click “next”

In Step 2, you confirm the registration of the vCloud Director Extender as a plugin in the source vCenter, then click “Next”.

Wait for the confirmation message, then click “Next”.

In Step 3, provide the parameters needed to configure the Tenant Replicator service, then click “Next”.

Wait for the confirmation message, then click “Next”.

In Step 4, you provide the parameters needed to activate the Replicator, then click “Next”.

Wait for the confirmation message, then click “Next”.

In Step 5, we’ve finished the OnPrem Setup. Click “Finish”.

After the initial Wizard that provides the connection to the source vCenter and the Replicator Service setup, you must access the “DC Extensions” tab to provide necessary parameters to deploy the L2VPN Appliance.
If NSX Manager is deployed on Premises, it is mandatory to choose “ADD NSX CONFIGURATION”.
In our scenario, we don’t have NSX on Premises so we’ll choose “ADD APPLIANCE CONFIGURATION” in the L2 Appliance Configuration section.

Provide the needed parameters to deploy the L2VPN Appliance. Pay attention to the following fields: Uplink Network, which maps to the PortGroup that grants Internet connectivity to the appliance, and Uplink Network Pool IP, which is the source IP Address used to connect to the L2VPN Server. Click “Create”.

Wait for the confirmation message that confirms the L2 Appliance configuration.

This concludes the configuration steps for the L2VPN appliance.
Accessing the Web Client, the Tenant can now configure L2 Extensions and manage workloads migration to the Cloud.

vCloud Director Extender Tenant operations

After the configuration steps ends, you can find a new Service registered in the source vCenter inventory: vCloud Director Extender. Click on the icon to launch the Management page for the Service.

On the vCloud Director Extender management page, you can find two dashboard that show you the overall Migration Health and the DC Extension Status for the L2VPNs.
Select “New Provider Cloud” to connect to your Service Provider.

Provide a descriptive name for the target Cloud, the URL of the target vCloud Director Organization for the Tenant, the URL of the target Extender Cloud Service (provided by the Service Provider) and finally your Org Admin credentials. Click “Test” to test the connection, wait for the confirmation message  then click “Add”

You can now see your target vCloud Director Organization appearing in the Provider Clouds tab.

We’ll now create a new L2 Extension from onPrem to the Cloud. Access the DC Extensions tab and click on “New Extension”.

Enter a name for this extension, select the source Datacenter, the source Network, the target Provider Cloud, vDC and Org Network. The “Enable egress” option enables you to have a local default gateway in each site with the same IP address, to optimize Egress traffic. With Egress optimization enabled, packets sent towards the Egress optimization IP will be routed locally by the Edge, everything else will be sent thru the bridge.
Click “Start” to enable the connection and make the L2 extension.

In the vSphere Web Client task console, you can view the “Trunk” Port Group being created with a SINK port. You can also see the Standalone Edge deployment is in progress.

After the tasks complete, you can see the L2VPN status as “Connected”. L2 Extension beetween the source and the target network is in place, so you can safely migrate your workloads to the Cloud without change in IP addressing, keeping the same connectivity you have on Premises. This is really Hybrid Cloud!

In the vCloud Director Extender Home, you can now see the DC Extension Status dashboard showing the L2VPN Tunnel is in place.

If we look at the L2VPN Statistics in vCloud Director, we can see the Tunnel Status as “up”.

It’s now time to migrate a workload to the Cloud leveraging this new L2VPN Tunnel to keep connectivity with on Premises. Access the Migrations tab and click on “NEW MIGRATION”.

Select the type of migration you want to perform: Cold migration requires the source VM to be powered off while Warm migration enables you to keep your VM runnning on Premises, starting a continuous file sync to the Cloud and completing the cutover when replica is completed. As the wizard highlight, Warm migration is not a vMotion. Click “Next” after the selection.

Select the source VM(s), then click “Next”. You can select more than one VM for each migration job.

Specify the target Cloud parameters: target Cloud, vDC, Storage Profile, Org. Network and vApp layout to create if you are migrating more than one VM. Click “Next” when finished.

Specify when you want to start the synchronization, the target RPO and the disk type (thin, thick). You can additionally specify a Tag for this migration job. When finished, click “Start”.

When the synchronization finishes, the workload will have a Status named “Cutover Ready”. This means that you can start the cutover process, that will Power Off the source VM and will Power On the VM in the Cloud. Click “Start Cutover” to specify the cutover parameters and start the process .

Specify the target cloud, the desired final power status of the target VM after cutover, then click “Start”.

The workload Status will became “Completed” once the Cutover finishes.

The migrated VM will be powered off on Premises.

On the target vCloud Director, we’ll find the migrated VM powered on.

Let’s use PING to test connectivity between VM1, still on Premises, and VM2, migrated to the Cloud. The connection will leverage the L2 Extension between on Premises and the Cloud. (Note: DUP! packets message occurs because I’m working in a nested environment).

There’s a 1:1 mapping between source VLAN and target VXLAN when you configure Datacenter Extension in vCloud Director Extender.
To stretch multiple VLANs you must create different Extensions in vCD Extender.

To show this let’s create a new PortGroup on Premises and a new Org vDC Network in the Cloud to see what happens when we need to create an additional network extension.

We configure a new Extension, mapping a local VLAN to the target Org vDC Network. The Status will show as “Connected” when the creation process finishes.

Looking at the changes automatically made in vCloud Director, we’ll find the new Org Network added as a stretched interface to the existing Site Configuration.

This concludes the CX Service On Prem configuration.