Lately I have been using quite some time on a lab environment which I had running in vCloud Air – There were two reasons for using vCloud Air, first one was to test it and see how it was to run something like this on the platform – I must say I was pleasantly surprised, compared to other cloud services vCloud Air seemed a lot faster, just like running a VM in an internal datacenter. The second reason, the one that got me on this track to test vCloud Air was a promotion to test vCloud Air and get some free credits to use as I like. This means you can test vCloud Air 100% free of charge as long as you keep your usage with in the credit given.

I needed a lab for a VMUG meeting – I was doing a session at the local VMUG on vRops and what better way to build a demo then to do it in vCloud Air! I had some issue getting it to run, no matter what I did, it would fail getting uploaded to vCloud Air(The vCD part). As the error massage in vCD is useless I had no real idea what was wrong or how to fix it. So I reach out to a lot of people to see if any help was available. In the end vCloud Air support came through with a solution, which I thought I would share if anybody else is thinking about putting vRops in vCloud Air here is a working solution.

Running vRops in vCloud Air

The steps are quite simple once you know them.

• First convert the ova to a ovf with the following line

ovftool "C:\vRealize-Operations-Manager-Appliance-6.1.0.3038036_OVF10.ova" "C:\vRealize-Operations-Manager-Appliance-6.1.0.3038036_OVF10\vRealize-Operations-Manager-Appliance-6.1.0.3038036_OVF10.ovf"

• Next edit the ovf file and change the SCSI controller

Change SCSI controller from VirtualSCSI to LSI Logic:
From:     <rasd:ResourceSubType>VirtualSCSI</rasd:ResourceSubType>
To:     <rasd:ResourceSubType>lsilogic</rasd:ResourceSubType>

• This one is optional – Remove the following line

<vmw:ExtraConfig vmw:key="numa.vcpu.preferHT" ovf:required="false" vmw:value="TRUE"/>

Last part is to upload it to vCloud Air – This should do it.

ovftool --X:logFile=vcd-upload.log --X:logLevel=verbose --sourceType="OVF" --vCloudTemplate="true" --acceptAllEulas --skipManifestCheck --allowExtraConfig "C:\vRealize-Operations-Manager-Appliance-6.1.0.3038036_OVF10\vRealize-Operations-Manager-Appliance-6.1.0.3038036_OVF10.ovf" "vcloud://myuser@email@vclouddirectorurl?vdc=TestVDC&org=TestOrg&vappTemplate=vROpsTest&catalog=TestCatalog"

Before you power on vRops, check the settings of the VM and remove the check mark on “Enable guest customization”.

If you like me think the above line of code is a bit to long to read – Try having a look at my wrapper for ovftool which can be found here

Also if you like to test out vCloud Air and get some free credits, see this link to register, promocode is part of the url, so just go ahead and register.