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exo-v2v

Experimental. exo-v2v 0.1.0 is an early release, validated in one lab (ESXi 7.0 U3 to Exoscale ch-gva-2). Try it on non-critical VMs first; commands and behaviour may change.

exo-v2v moves a running VMware vSphere virtual machine to an Exoscale Compute instance. The VM keeps running while its disks are copied; it is stopped only for the final cutover, which took 2 to 9 minutes in our tests, whatever the size of the disks.

exo-v2v architecture: a replication appliance in vSphere reads frozen VM disks and writes them through an SSH tunnel to the target Exoscale instance

  • Replicate while the VM runs. The VM's disks are copied straight to the disks of the target instance, then kept in sync with VMware Changed Block Tracking: each cycle copies only what changed.
  • Cut over. The VM is shut down, the last changes are copied, the guest is converted for KVM on the target instance itself, and the instance boots the migrated system from its own disks.

No VDDK, no vSphere plugin, no agent inside the guest, no staging storage.

Where to start

Page What it covers
How it works The replication appliance, sync cycles, cutover, guest adaptation, security model
Prerequisites vSphere privileges, the appliance, network flows, Exoscale account
IAM role A least-privilege Exoscale role for the appliance's API key
Receiver templates Templates that boot straight into the receiver, and the Packer recipe that builds them
Operations runbook Step-by-step migration, rollback, troubleshooting
Supported operating systems Tested and expected-to-work guests, measured downtime
Limitations Known limits and their workarounds
Architecture Design details for contributors

Install

On the replication appliance (a Linux VM in the same vSphere environment, with Python 3.10 or later and the exo CLI):

pipx install https://github.com/retrack/exo-v2v/releases/download/v0.1.0/exo_v2v-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
exo config                          # Exoscale credentials for the exo CLI
export VSPHERE_HOST=vcenter.example VSPHERE_USER=migration@vsphere.local VSPHERE_PASSWORD=…

Migrate a VM

exo-v2v plan    web01 --vm web01 --zone ch-gva-2 --security-group web
exo-v2v create  web01                   # target instance and volumes
sudo -E exo-v2v sync web01              # first cycle: full copy, the VM keeps running
sudo -E exo-v2v sync web01 --every 900  # keep it fresh until the maintenance window
sudo -E exo-v2v cutover web01           # downtime starts here
exo-v2v cleanup web01                   # after you validated the workload

plan prints everything it will do and refuses unsupported VMs; nothing is created before create. Every step can be repeated or resumed, and exo-v2v rollback powers the source VM back on until cleanup.

exo-v2v is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Source: github.com/retrack/exo-v2v.