While OVF Tool is a great command-line utility, VMware customers also need a GUI-based tool that provides the ability to migrate from on-premises virtualization to the cloud. To meet that need, VMware introduced vCloud Connector, now in version 2.7.2. As shown in the following figure, vCloud Connector consists of the vCloud Connector Server for the “Internal” components (on the left side of the diagram), along with additional copies of the vCloud Connector Nodes running at the VMware Cloud Provider locations. This service provider-side vCloud Connector node is typically made available from the vCloud Director Public Catalog to make it easy for customers to deploy to their environments.

 

vCloud Connector is a free tool and performs offline migration of applications to the VMware Cloud Provider. The key difference from OVF Tool is that vCloud Connector orchestrates the V2C use case and allows a single place to execute application workload migration that is available from the vSphere C# client as shown in the following figure (visible in the bottom left of the C# client after the vCloud Connector solution is registered). vCloud Connector supports the creation of stretched Layer 2 networks that can be used for common subnets across clouds, easing the requirement to provide networking in the target tenant during migration. Those capabilities are not covered in this section of vCAT-SP.

 

One of the features that previously came only in an Advanced Edition of vCloud Connector (all features are bundled and free as of vCloud Connector version 2.6), is Content Sync. Content Sync enables you to synchronize content across multiple clouds. It allows you to create a master library of templates and to keep the templates synchronized among users across different clouds. Users subscribe to content that is published to the master library, known as the Content Library. Any changes to items in the Content Library are automatically reflected in the subscribers' folders or catalogs. For example, if a template is added to a folder or catalog that is published to the Content Library, it is added to each subscriber's folder or catalog as well at a preset interval. As shown in the following figure, users can subscribe to a Content Library that syncs to prescribed Catalogs inside each of their mapped VMware Cloud Provider or other vCloud Director based organizations.

 

While the self-service model for vCloud Connector is attractive for end users to perform their own migration of application workloads to the VMware Cloud Provider cloud, often times the bandwidth or reliability of the network connection can cause frustration for users trying to upload larger virtual machine disk files. Configuring vCloud Connector for multi-tenancy as well as handling large numbers and sizes of files is described in the next section. Another way in which vCloud Connector can be deployed is for Offline Data Transfer (ODT), which accommodates large file transfers (with latency that is bound by how quickly you can copy data to a drive). You can then ship it to the VMware Cloud Provider and have it loaded into the Organization Catalog. The following figure illustrates this process where the “External Storage Disk” plays the role of the network in a typical vCloud Connector migration.

 

In this case, the customer is still responsible for the migration but the bytes are transferred to storage devices mounted as an NFS file system. The metadata for the vApps are posted to the Organization Catalog in vCloud Director and the VMware Cloud Provider mounts the drive to complete the process, copying the bytes to the data store for the vApps. As shown in the following figure, this operation is available for vApps that are in a “Stopped” state, and a special button is provided after the NFS storage has been configured. More information about configuring vCloud Connector for ODT is provided in the following section.