Introducing Morpheus Change Cloud Functionality

[#1]

Change Cloud functionality was added earlier this month with Morpheus 5.4.9 (LTS) release. It’s also coming soon to Morpheus 5.5.2 (Standard). It’s useful for maintaining clean records in situations where users have moved workloads from one integrated Cloud to another (such as from one VMware VDC or Cluster to another). It’s important to keep in mind, this is not a migration tool. It’s a tool for cleaning up records in situations where you have two server records in Morpheus which are representative of the same workload and that have been (manually) moved to a new Cloud. For those interested in seeing more, I put together a demo, take a look:

[#2]

Great feature, thank you!

[#3]

Is it possible to do this when the cloud you’re migrating to hasn’t been inventoried?

I tried manually adding a VM to a cloud, then going through the move dialog to assign the old VM to that new VM, but all that happened is the VM I manually added was deleted.

[#4]

This is cool. Seems like a great feature to use when coupled with implementing a disaster recovery tool / method that uses snapshots to move resources from one cloud to another.

A couple of questions:

1. If I click “Save Changes” and then realize that was a mistake, what recourse do I have to unmerge the records?
2. Any intentions of giving this functionality to instances as well? I would love to be able to do this with resources built by IaC tools in cases of region service failure.

[#5]

It’s an administrator level function, which is why no users outside of System Admins have access to it from the start. Care should be taken when using it.

There isn’t an unmerge button, per se, but you can send the server back to its original Cloud. You aren’t required to choose a target server when you do this as I did in my demo. You can simply identify a new Cloud (without selecting a target server) and the selected server will have its Cloud association changed without altering any other records. This could be used to send your server back to its original Cloud.

The intended use case of the feature, however, is the one I showed in the demo: You’ve manually moved a VM to another Cloud and you want to retain a pre-existing server record in Morpheus to continue representing the moved workload.

[#6]

I just used this feature. Hugely convenient. We had a customer in one Morpheus vCenter Cloud (Resource Pool), and we needed to move him to another. I moved him in vCenter first (Host View, drag and drop to the new resource pool), then used the Change Cloud to change his cloud to the right vCenter cloud that utilized the newly assigned resource pool.

This begs an interesting question. What do we do, if we decide not to use Morpheus Resource Pools, but want to have a separation of instances within the same vCenter “cloud”? Is that even possible in Morpheus to do that?