Thursday, April 17, 2014

Alternate Method for Converting VMware vCenter Server from Physical to Virtual (VM)

At some point you are going to figure out that the advantages of having your vCenter Server as a VM outweigh the risks, and you're going to want to convert your existing physical vCenter into a virtual one.

There are a few ways of going about this, including just migrating vCenter to a fresh VM.

However, if you're stuck using only the VMware Converter standalone, you may find it frustratingly hard to make the conversion.

If you throw caution to the wind and just convert the vCenter Server on the fly while it's running (using the sync command to try an clean up after), you may get lucky, but more than likely you will have database corruption and other fun.

If you follow VMware's procedures for converting the machine and shut down all the services, the SQL databases, etc. then the VMware Converter can't connect to your vCenter to add the machine to the cluster.

One way around that would be converting to a seperate ESXi host that isn't in your cluster, and later join the host to the cluster, bringing vCenter with it.

However, that's a bit difficult when you are remote to a network (like I was) so there is no oppourtunity to provision physical hardware.

The answer? Double-Conversion.

Shut down all of the necessary services on your vCenter server, and run the Standalone VMware Converter.

Once there, simply convert your vCenter server to a VMware Workstation/Fusion .vmdk image.

Once that is complete, reboot vCenter so all the services are functional again, and convert that .vmdk into a VM on your cluster with the Standalone VMware Converter. vCenter treats this like any other vanilla VM, nothing special is needed.

Yes, you have a period of time where the old vCenter is running and controlling the network, and you're going to be 'going back in time' so to speak to the time of the conversion, but it's no worse than restoring vCenter from a backup.

I connected my new vCenter VM to a dummy network, and did all the final cleanup on it (installing vmxnet3, pvscsi, etc).

Make sure vCenter is running. If you have 5.1 with the Single Sign On (SSO) service, it will probably keep you from running vCenter.

It's not an error in the conversion process. When enough hardware changes, it breaks the SSO service, which still starts normally. However, vCenter won't start. The full article from VMware about this condition is here:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2036170

The set of commands I had to use was:

set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\jre
cd C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\SSOServer\Utils
rsautil manage-secrets -a recover -m MASTER_PASSWORD


(Where MASTER_PASSWORD is your master password when you installed vCenter/SSO)


When you have everything on your vCenter VM running smoothly, shut down your physical vCenter server, and connect your vSphere Client to the raw ESXi host holding your vCenter VM. Once you start it, you'll be able to connect to vCenter as per normal.

Make sure you've read the various forums on how to protect yourself from a bad situation with a virtual vCenter server.

Oh, and if you can keep the old physical server around for a bit, you have a quick emergency backup in case you run into a problem cold-starting your datacenter.