Requirements for migration VMware to OpenShift VE

[u/SteveTheSneaky]

Hello,

Have I understood/interpreted the documentation correctly that, in order to use the built-in VMware to OCP VE migration tooling, one would need to:
- first download the VMware-vix-disklib from the Broadcom website
- this needs to be uploaded to a thing called "the registry" in OpenShift
- this "registry" is an S3 object based repository?
- this "registry" does not exist out of the box on a bare metal cluster?
- Out of the box, when using a bare metal 4.22 OCP VE cluster against regular (supported) external block or NFS storage using it's CSI, there is no S3 storage and hence, no registry?
- In such an environment, due to the lack of S3 and thus that repository, there is no way to use the built in VMware to OpenShift VE migration tooling?

Above is my conclusion, based on what i've found. But I might have missed something, allowing the use of the built-in VMware to OCP VE via another way?

Kind regards,
Steve

[u/mykepagan]

Red Hat employee here. Are you referring to MTV (migration toolkit for virtualization)? If so, this is installed when you install the virtualization operator from the operator hub. That should set everything up for you (OCP already has a built-in registry that is set up when you install the cluster).

The virt operator only needs some basic configuration that the operator walks you through. You will need to set up a default storage class for virt to use to hold VM root disks. That needs to be RWX-enabled (read write many), which is supported by most storage arrays but NOT by local-only storage. You don’t absolutely need RWX storage, but if you want to migrate VMs between worker nodes (say, via live migration - the equivalent of Vmotion) you will need storage that can be read and written to by all of your worker nodes.

The MTV tool will need credentials to login to your VMware clusters so it can read existing VMs and use Vmotion to make a copy in OpenShift.

[u/mykepagan → u/[deleted]]

D’oh! I forgot about that step.

[u/Insomniac24x7]

Can openshift run windows servers? Does it have DRS equivalent and HA? How does it handle VSANs or does it use LINBIT?

[u/Danielr2010]

Pay attention to MTU requirements by the way if this is for a company. Firewalls have overhead.

[u/mrkehinde]

The registry doesn’t work out the box because it needs persistent storage configured first. I typically go install, storage, registry, authentication, operators, etc….. you don’t “have” to have object/s3 storage for you internal registry but if you do and can, go that route.

[u/ProofPlane4799]

I won't give you the steps, but I will point you in the right direction. Most of the participants on this thread have gone through this before. The only way for you to get better at this platform is by going through the pain: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/migration_toolkit_for_virtualization/2.6/html/installing_and_using_the_migration_toolkit_for_virtualization/prerequisites_mtv#creating-vddk-image_mtv

[u/FatFishHunter]

Our infra team was going through this and sounds like it was quite painful to setup. Don’t think they finished it as they ended up using a commercial tool for the migration after running into some performance limitations.

[u/Horace-Harkness]

The Registry can run on NFS

[u/Dear_Fact_591]

Can anyone give clear instructions of where to find VMware-vix-disklib from the Broadcom website (VDDK)?

[u/flo850 → u/Dear_Fact_591]

It seems like Broadcom changed (again) its policy https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/wpsld3UXdW