Importing Virtual Machines into vCloud Director

So now that we have a nice new vCloud Director implementation, we need to think about how we are going to get our customers Virtual Machines imported, and placed in the appropriate vApp.

I'm going to assume you already have a process to import Virtual Machine(s) into vCenter. If your doing P2V, probably VMware Converter or something similar, if you are importing a Virtual Machine, then something more straight forward.

For a successful import into vCloud Director, the vCenter that you are importing your Virtual Machine(s) into will need to be attached to vCloud Director.




When you have got your VMs into vCenter, you will need to import them as vApps into vCD. Bear in mind that each VM will be imported into its own vApp, so you will have lots of single Virtual Machine vApps.

In vCloud Director, open up the Organisation that the VMs will be imported into, and select My Cloud -> vApps. Click the Import from vSphere... button

You will then be shown the Virtual Machines in the selected vCenter Server that can be imported. You need to select the required Virtual Machine, name the vApp, and select the Organisation vDC that you want to place it in.

Finally, before hitting OK, you will need to select Move VM or Copy VM... depending on whether you want the VM to remain in vCenter or not.

When all the VMs have been imported, you can group them into a single vApp if you want. Simply open the vApp in question, right click the VM (when its not running), and select Move ... You can then specify the destination vApp for this Virtual Machine. The source vApp will now be empty, and can be deleted. Repeat this for as many VMs that you want within the destination vApp.

The final thing you need to do is configure the networking for the newly added VMs in the vApp. I'm going to assume that the vApp has the appropriate networks added to it, so it is just a case of opening the vApp up, editing the Virtual Machines that have been imported, and allocating the correct vApp network to its NICs.