Virtual Appliance Migration

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If, for some reason, you have to migrate your NComputing Virtual Appliance somewhere else, this article has the right information for you.

Migrate the Virtual Appliance into another virtualization host

This section applies if you want to migrate the complete Virtual Appliance, as it is, from one virtualization host into another. This happens for example when

The good news is, there is nothing special about the NComputing Virtual Appliance. You can freely move it around, import/export, as you can do with any other virtual machine. Please refer

There are just some pieces of advice:

  • Before migrating, shut down the virtual appliance.
  • Should the Virtual Appliance become suspended, please reboot it afterwards.

A simple migration from one virtualized server to another usually does not trigger a change in IP address or host name. Should you have to change these, please refer to this article: IP address change

Migrate the data from one VA into another VA instance

VA-en-Backup.jpg

This section applies if you have two VA instances and you want to move data, configuration, images, etc from one instance over to the other one. Typically this happens if

  • you want to start with a new VA instance because the current one is too old (well, did you have a look at updating NoTouch Center?)
  • you want to start with a fresh instance because the current one is somehow dysfunctional

Whatever the reasons are, migration to another VA instance is really simple:

  1. Log in to the old instance, and click on the "Backup" main menu entry, then click on "Retrieve Backup". A file containing the backup data will be downloaded immediately to your desktop.
  2. Log in to the new instance, also on the "Backup" main menu entry, but then click on "Restore prior backup". Upload the backup file there.
    • If this "fresh" instance contains any data you want to preserve, backup the new instance first, or else all data will be overwritten with the contents of the backup (of course).
  3. Our backup files do not contain actual client OS images to prevent excessive backup file size. Most likely you'll have had a few client OS images stored on the old VA. You need to upload them to new VA also. There a few possibilities, choose what is easier for you:
    • Get them from the old VA, e.g. by connecting to the "images" Windows file share that the VA offers. Download to your local machine, and then log in to the "images" Windows file share of the new instance, and upload them.
    • Download from NComputing and upload by clicking on "OS images" and subsequently "Upload OS image" in the new instance.
    • Or, if you like, copy them over via SSH login by executing these commands:
      • scp /opt/center/images/* newinstance:/opt/center/images
      • scp /var/www/pxe/* newinstance:/var/www/pxe
  4. Our advice is to shutdown the old VA instance now and assign its IP address to the new instance. If you must assign a new IP address, please read here: IP address change
  5. The backup contains the full NoTouch Center software. Thus, your new Virtual Appliance will now run on the same NoTouch Center version that you had in the old appliance. You may consider updating NoTouch Center.