Intercloud Fabric enables you to onboard virtual machines from provider clouds to Intercloud Fabric. The onboarding process occurs directly in the provider cloud; you do not have to bring virtual machines back to the private cloud. Onboarding cloud virtual machines enables you to:

• Manage all virtual machines from a single location in Intercloud Fabric.

• Use the enterprise IP address space.

• Use all of the Intercloud Fabric security mechanisms for provider instances.

• Use the enterprise infrastructure and management framework, such as LDAP or DNS, by extending private subnets to the provider cloud.

• Onboarding provider cloud VMs to Intercloud Fabric is only supported on Amazon Web Services EC2 Classic and Amazon Web Services EC2 VPC.

• The onboarding process applies within a region; the virtual machine and destination VDC are in the same region.

• After the virtual machine is onboarded to Intercloud Fabric, the virtual machine is assigned a private IP address. You must manually update any applications that explicitly used the provider’s IP address before onboarding if the applications are expected to communicate with the newly assigned private IP address.

• Windows virtual machines can be onboarded but cannot be moved to the private cloud.

• Linux virtual machines with nonpartitioned disks that can be onboarded cannot be moved to the private cloud.

• Linux virtual machines that are expected to move back to the private cloud must be referred to by using persistent names (that is, by UUID or label) in /etc/fstab instead of nonpersistent names, such as /dev/xvda. For example:

  • In the grub configuration file, the kernel parameter root must refer to the root partition using a label or ID.

    Example of a label/ID in grub.conf:

    kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-431.29.2.el6.x86_64 console=ttyS0 
    ro root=UUID=9996863e-b964-47d3-a33b-3920974fdbd9 
    rd_NO_LUKS  KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us 
    LANG=en_US.UTF-8 xen_blkfront.sda_is_xvda=1 
    console=ttyS0,115200n8 console=tty0 rd_NO_MD SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 
    crashkernel=auto rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_DM

  • In the file system configuration file /etc/fstab, the first column should have a label or ID instead of a partition name.

    Example of a label/ID in fstab:

    UUID=9996863e-b964-47d3-a33b-3920974fdbd9 /                       
    ext4    
    defaults        1 1

• For Amazon VPCs, onboarding is supported only if the onboarded VM is on the same VPC as an Intercloud Fabric cloud. Also, onboarding is not supported for an AWS instance that is linked to the VPC using ClassicLink.

• AWS instances on nondefault VPCs cannot be onboarded to AWS EC2 Classic-based Intercloud Fabric clouds.

• Ensure that you have the credentials for the virtual machines that you will onboard to Intercloud Fabric.

• Ensure that you have updated the following for the onboarded virtual machine from the provider console so that Intercloud Fabric can communicate with the virtual machine:

  • Change the security group of the virtual machines in Amazon EC2 VPC to the security group of the virtual machine created by Intercloud Fabric.

  • Add inbound rules for UDP and TCP ports 6644 and 6646, and TCP port 22 to the security groups of the virtual machines in Amazon EC2 Classic. The security groups should match the security group of the virtual machine created by Intercloud Fabric.

• If a Windows VM firewall or IP tables are configured in the provider cloud, ensure that the required ports are open.

• Ensure that you have the required utilities, such as WinSCP, to copy the onboard package to the onboarding Windows virtual machine in the provider cloud.

• To prepare for onboarding a Windows VM, complete the following steps:

  1. Copy the zipped bundle on to the Windows VM.

  2. Create a folder named Cisco under c:\Program Files (x86)\.

  3. Extract the contents of the zipped bundle into the Cisco folder.

  4. Double-click the icf_onboard-* application executable.

     The VM is now ready for onboarding in Intercloud Fabric.

• Ensure that you have already installed SSH on Linux virtual machines.

• Collect the following information for the virtual machine you are onboarding:

  • Instance ID

  • OS version

  • Architecture (32-bit or 64-bit)

  • CPU

  • Memory

  • Disk size