This tutorial is about importing a VM from a VMWare infrastructure on-premise into the cloud with all its settings (storage, networking, VLAN's etc). Maybe you are running out of resources, but need to grow your VM or just need to free some resources in your VMWare environment without deleting some of the VM's.
Here is the VMWare client tooling, showing a running Linux VM. That 2012-Test VM should be migrated to a cloud environment.
Switch to Ravello and navigate to Library/VM's
Select Import VM.
If you haven't installed the upload tool, you get a download link. Install the Import Tool if necessary. Then log into the Import Tool and select Upload.
Choose Extract and Upload VM's from vCenter, vSphere or ESX (recommended).
Login with your VMWare credentials
Browse your VM's.
Use the search, if you have too many. Then choose the wanted VM and click Upload.
Waiting for the upload to be done. A good time to get some new coffee...
Finally done. That one took about an hour.
Switch to your library to find your new VM. Ravello also imported the VM sizing, which is 1 CPU, 4 GB RAM and 36 GB disk. Click on Edit and Verify VM and finish editing. The point about that is: after uploading the VM, it is available within seconds, as it runs in its original format. No conversion is necessary, the VM can immediately be used in an application.
To use that newly uploaded VM in an application, go to Applications, click on Create Application and on Create to finish that dialog.
Drag & Drop the VM into the application.
Switching to the NIC's tab shows, that the VLAN tag has also been imported.
On the Network tab see the networking. Click on Publish to publish the application to a cloud service provider.
Make your choice, then click on Publish. In this case, we did choose Performance Option. Only with that Option you can choose a location. A reason to do that may be latency requirements. Here, we selected the Location 'Europe West 2'.
Here you are, your on-premise VM is now running in the cloud.
But what if you might want some more horsepower, now that you can access resources from the cloud? Why not add more RAM and CPU?
As we already published this application to a cloud service provider, we need to stop the application first. Hint: if you already know, that you want more capacity, do this before publishing.
Change the settings to your like and click on Save.
Now this is important, so that is probably why the developers highlighted it and show you a warning. Click the Update button, or your changes won't apply.
Restart the VM, here are your 4 cores.
So this tutorial demonstrated, how fast and easy a VM can be copied from a given VMWare environment on-premise to a cloud service provider using Oracle Ravello. Relevant attributes as networking inlcuding VLAN-tagging have been imported. The VM has just been moved to the cloud, but thanks to Ravello it does not need to be converted (as with other vendors solutions), it just runs. Once running in the cloud, it is easy to scale up (and down again) the VM to your needs.
