Moving from Windows to appliance

With vRO 7, the Windows install of Orchestrator doesn't exist anymore. This recipe discusses how to move an existing Windows Orchestrator installation to the appliance.

Getting ready

We need an Orchestrator installed on Windows.

Download the same version of the Orchestrator appliance as you have installed in the Windows version. If needed, upgrade the Windows version to the latest possible one.

How to do it...

There are three ways; using the migration tool, repointing to an external database, or exporting/importing the packages.

Migration tool

There is a migration tool that comes with vRO7 that allows you to pack up your vRO5.5 or 6.x install and deploy it into a vRO7. The migration tool works on Windows and Linux. It collects the configuration, the plugins, as well as their configuration certificates, and licensing into a file. Follow these steps to use the migration tool:

1. Deploy a new vRO7 appliance.
2. Log in to your Windows Orchestrator OS.
3. Stop the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Service (Windows services).
4. Open a web browser and log into your new vRO7 - Control Center and then go to Export/Import Configuration.
5. Select Migrate Configuration and click on the here link. The link points to: https://[vRO7]:8283/vco-controlcenter/api/server/migration-tool .
6. Stop the vRO7 Orchestrator service.
7. Unzip the migration-tool.zip and copy the subfolder called migration-cli into the Orchestrator director, for example, C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Orchestrator\migration-cli\bin\.
8. Open a command prompt.
9. If you have Java installed, make sure your path points to it. Try java -version. If that works, continue, if not, do the following:
10. Set the PATH environment variable to the Java install that comes with Orchestrator, set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Orchestrator\Uninstall_vCenter Orchestrator\uninstall-jre\bin
11. CD to the directory ..\Orchestrator\migration-cli\bin.
12. Execute the command; vro-migrate.bat export. There may be errors showing about SLF4J; you can ignore those.
13. In the main directory (..\Orchestrator) you should now find an orchestrator-config-export-VC55-[date].zip file.
14. Go back to the web browser and upload the ZIP file into Migration Configuration by clicking on Browse and selecting the file.
15. Click on Import. You can now see what can be imported. You can unselect the items you don't wish to migrate. Click Finish Migration.
16. Restart the Orchestrator service.
17. Check the settings.
    

External database

If you have an external database, things are pretty easy. For using the initial internal database, please see the additional steps in the There's more... section of this recipe.

1. Backup the external database.
2. Connect to the Windows Orchestrator Configurator.
3. Write down all the plugins you have installed as well as their version.
4. Shut down the Windows version and deploy the appliance, this way you can use the same IP and Hostname if you want.
5. Log into the appliance version's Configurator.
6. Stop the Orchestrator service
7. Install all plugins you had in the Windows version.
8. Attach the external database.
9. Make sure that all trusted SSL certificates are still there, such as vCenter and SSO.
10. Check if the authentication is still working. Use the test login.
11. Check your licensing.
12. Force a plugin reinstall (Troubleshooting | Reinstall the plug-ins when the server starts).
13. Start the Orchestrator service and try to log in.
14. Make a complete sanity check.

Package transfer

This is the method that will only pull your packages across. This the only easy method to use when you are transitioning between different databases, such as between MS SQL and PostgreSQL:

1. Connect to your Windows version
2. Create a package of all the workflows, actions, and other items you need.
3. Shut down Windows and deploy the appliance.
4. Configure the appliance with DB, authentication, and all the plugins you previously had.
5. Import the package.

How it works...

Moving from the Windows version of Orchestrator to the appliance version isn't such a big thing. The worst-case scenario is using the packaging transfer. The only really important thing is to use the same version of the Windows Orchestrator as the appliance version. You can download a lot of old versions, including 5.5, from www.vmware.com . If you can't find the same version, upgrade your existing vCenter Orchestrator to one you can download.

After you have transferred the data to the appliance, you need to make sure that everything works correctly, and then you can upgrade to vRO7.

There's more...

When you just run Orchestrator from your Windows vCenter installation and don't configure an external database, then Orchestrator uses the vCenter database and mixes the Orchestrator tables with the vCenter tables. In order to only export the Orchestrator ones, we will use the MS SQL Server Management Studio (free download from www.microsoft.com called Microsoft SQL Server RTM).

To transfer only the Orchestrator database tables from the vCenter MS-SQL to an external SQL, do the following:

1. Stop the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Service (Windows Services) on your Windows Orchestrator.
2. Start the SQL Server Management Studio on your external SQL server.
3. Connect to the vCenter DB. For SQL Express, use [vcenter]\VIM_SQLEXP with Windows Authentication.
4. Right-click on your vCenter Database (SQL Express: VIM_VCDB) and select Tasks | Export Data.
5. In the wizard, select your source, which should be the correct one already, and click Next.
6. Choose SQL Server Native Client 10.0 and enter the name of your new SQL server. Click on New to create a new database on that SQL server (or use an empty one you created already). Click Next.
7. Select Copy data from one or more tables or views and click Next.
8. Now select every database which starts with VMO_ and then click Next.
   

9. Select Run immediately and click Finish.

Now you have the Orchestrator database extracted as an external database. You still need to configure a user and rights. Then proceed with the External database section in this recipe.