vCloud Director transfer server storage is out of scope for this document but can be found in other portions of the vCAT-SP. By default, a vCloud Connector node offers a 40-GB staging area, which is available as a LVM Volume Group in the node (shown from the Linux console with a df –h shell command). You can increase the staging area by following this procedure.

For vCloud Director based vCloud Connector nodes, you cannot increase the virtual hardware disk size (because the disk resize routine is not a feature of vCloud Director). You have to add an extra virtual disk, and add this disk to the staging area. The procedure is described in the “Configure vCloud Connector Nodes” section of the VMware Installing and Configuring vCloud Connector guide.

Rather than making each tenant deploy a vCloud Connector node, the service provider can provide each tenant with a URL to a vCloud Connector node that is managed for items like disk capacity. These vCloud Connector nodes are called multitenant nodes and can support up to 20 tenants each. It is possible to alleviate both tenant storage and network bandwidth consumption when undergoing migration with vCloud Connector as opposed to private vCloud Connector Node deployed inside of the Org VDC. VMware Cloud Provider administrators can access the console of the multitenant node for storage expansion or access the log files as shown in the “Accessing Log Files from the Console” section of the installation and configuration guide. Other items, such as installation of production certificates and configuring maximum concurrent tasks are also detailed in the “Preparing vCloud Connector for Production Use” chapter of the same document. Multitenant vCloud Connector nodes run in a headless fashion with regard to vCloud Connector functionality (requiring port 8443 open for communication as well as vCloud Director on TCP 443).

Network throughput of the migration itself can also be tuned in the form of enabling UDT. UDT is a reliable, high-speed data transfer protocol based on UDP (User Datagram Protocol). UDT offers significantly higher speeds for transfer over high-latency, high-bandwidth networks. By default, data is transferred as plain text with the UDT protocol but you can choose to encrypt data. Select data encryption by choosing the Enable Encryption option on the destination vCloud Connector node. Note that selecting this option is the only way to enable encryption with UDT. The SSL setting only applies to HTTP(s) transfer and has no effect on UDT transfer. Be aware that there is some performance degradation associated with encryption.

With UDT, data transfer occurs over a dynamically-generated port on the source node and port 8190 on the destination node. Any firewall rules must allow for this type of connection for UDT-based data transfer. (When you copy data between a private cloud and a public cloud, data transfer is between a dynamically-generated port on the private cloud node and port 8190 on the public cloud node. Port 8190 must be open in the public cloud.) If you use a proxy server with UDT, communication between the local node and the proxy server occurs with two separate connections. For more information on tuning UDT and running UDT with a SOCKS5 proxy server, see the “Set UDT Properties” and “Using Proxy Servers” sections of the same guide. Instructions on how to configure NAT and firewall settings for individual components are also found throughout the guide. In the interest of “unit testing” software components, refer to the 2105292 Knowledge Base article from the VMware Cloud Provider Program about potential testing of vCloud Connector connections.