Lab Manager to vCloud Director Import Script

One major challenge when migrating from Lab Manager to vCloud Director is getting all of your VM Templates, Library entries, and needed configurations migrated across.  When I first looked at this it there was a partially scripted process using perl code that was long and very hard to understand.  I found it was better to do the process manually at that point as I’m not any good with perl and I was still trying to get VCD down.

Once PowerCLI released some VCD cmdlets we revisited the process and through lots of searching, digging through extension data, multiple posts on the communities, etc… we were able to automate the import process.  It was long and ugly, and failed a lot of the time so we didn’t use it.

We have migrated a lot of departments to VCD but still have a few more to go so I thought I’d refresh my script to see if it would work better.  I was thrilled to see the improvements in PowerCLI cmdlets for VCD.  I was able to cut out almost 100 lines of code from the script, and it now works properly, so I thought I’d share a few changes.

First change is thin provisioning the VM.  This script was used to find the datastore with the most free space:

$datastores = get-datastore | select Name,FreeSpaceMB
$LargestFree = "0"
$dsView = $null
foreach ($datastore in $datastores) {
    if ($Datastore.FreeSpaceMB -gt $LargestFree) {
            $LargestFree = $Datastore.FreeSpaceMB
            $dsView = $Datastore.name
            }
        }

Updated code saving eight lines of code:

$dsView = Get-Datastore PD* | Sort FreeSpaceGB -Descending | Select-Object -First 1

Once you get the datastore ($dsView) you want to svMotion to:
Previous script:

Get-VM $vm2Import | % {
            $vmview = $_ | Get-View -Property Name
            $spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineRelocateSpec
            $spec.datastore =  $dsView.MoRef
            $spec.transform = "flat"
            $vmview.RelocateVM($spec, $null)
        }

With PowerCLI 5.1:

Get-VM $vm2Import | Move-VM -Datastore $dsView -DiskStorageFormat Thin -confirm:$false

As you can see this saved six lines of code. That doesn’t sound like a lot but it all adds up.

One of the major changes is the internal vApp network creation. The vApps all use internal vApp NAT Routed networks.  Using some code from Clint Kitson’s Unofficial VMware vCD Cmdlets the following code was used to create the internal routed network:

$orgNetworkName = "importOrgNetwok"
$orgNetwork = (Get-Org "importOrg").extensiondata.networks.network | where {$_.name -eq $orgNetworkName}
$mynetwork = new-object vmware.vimautomation.cloud.views.vappnetworkconfiguration
$mynetwork.networkName = "vAppInternalNetwork"
$mynetwork.configuration = new-object vmware.vimautomation.cloud.views.networkconfiguration
$mynetwork.configuration.fencemode = "natRouted"
$mynetwork.Configuration.ParentNetwork = New-Object vmware.vimautomation.cloud.views.reference
$mynetwork.Configuration.ParentNetwork.Href = $orgNetwork.href
$mynetwork.Configuration.IpScope = new-object vmware.vimautomation.cloud.views.ipscope
$mynetwork.Configuration.IpScope.gateway = "192.168.10.1"
$mynetwork.Configuration.IpScope.Netmask = "255.255.255.0"
$mynetwork.Configuration.IpScope.Dns1 = "192.168.1.10"
$mynetwork.Configuration.IpScope.ipranges = new-object vmware.vimautomation.cloud.views.ipranges
$mynetwork.Configuration.IpScope.IpRanges.IpRange = new-object vmware.vimautomation.cloud.views.iprange
$mynetwork.Configuration.IpScope.IpRanges.IpRange[0].startaddress = "192.168.10.10"
$mynetwork.Configuration.IpScope.IpRanges.IpRange[0].endaddress = "192.168.10.15"
$mynetwork.Configuration.features += new-object vmware.vimautomation.cloud.views.firewallservice
$mynetwork.Configuration.features[0].isenabled = $false
$networkConfigSection = (Get-Org "importOrg" | get-civapp "importVappName").ExtensionData.GetNetworkConfigSection()
$networkConfigSection.networkconfig += $mynetwork
$networkConfigSection.updateserverdata()

With PowerCLI this was cut down to one line:

New-CIVAppNetwork -VApp $newVappName -ParentOrgNetwork ($orgInto+"-OrgNetwork") -Name 'vAppInternalNetwork' -PrimaryDns '192.168.1.10' -Routed -Gateway '192.168.10.1' -Netmask '255.255.255.0' -DisableFirewall -StaticIPPool "192.168.10.10 - 192.168.10.15"

That’s a 20 line savings!!!

Once a script works I don’t usually revisit it unless there’s and issue with it but these three examples saved 34 lines of code, even more if you add comment lines no longer needed. I may have to go back through some other scripts and see what I can do with them.