Provider ID as VM identifier upgrade

Abiquo 5.3 introduces the provider ID as a unique VM identifier for deployed VMs. The Abiquo UUID will continue as the VM's identifier in the API, even when undeploying and deploying the VM again.

This document gives a general overview of the migration for the provider ID feature as part of the upgrade to Abiquo 5.3.0.

We expect that the provider ID migration could take a long time in large environments, so you should allow extra time for your upgrade and test it the largest test environment that you have available.

Abiquo has developed a set of provider ID migration (PIM) tools to run once to upgrade the platform and adapt the platform data to the new identifier. The tools are jar files in a separate RPM package.

You must test this update in a lab environment before you run it in your production environment.

Before you upgrade to Abiquo 5.3 you must:

Create a full backup of the platform
Create dumps of the database and Redis.

During the upgrade, after you update the database, run the PIM tools.

To keep your database credentials secure, the PIM tools use runtime encryption.

Full PIM migration process in a lab environment

First run the full PIM migration process in your lab environment.

Start the upgrade process

Run the upgrade process as usual and stop after you update the database.

Stage 1: planning

Run the PIM planner tool against your database. This tool will create a migration plan for all of your VMs and list the required migration steps.
Check the migration plan and resolve any warnings or errors.

Stage 2: migration dry run

For ALL Remote Services servers, copy the migration plan to the server.
On each Remote Services server, run the migration plan. By default the PIM migrator tool will run in "dry run" mode. For each entity in the migration plan, the PIM migrator tool will connect to the provider and compute the provider ID.
Check the output of the PIM migrator tool and resolve any warnings or errors.

Stage 3: migration

Run the PIM migrator tool in update mode with the "--no-dry-run" option.
1. The PIM migrator tool will update VMs, as well as backup jobs, firewalls, load balancers.
2. The PIM migrator tool will output an SQL update file.
While the Abiquo platform is still stopped, run the migrator's SQL update file.
The SQL update will issue may issue warnings if you run it with Java 8
After you complete the migration and restart your environment, check it as described below

Check your environment

The migration should only change the identification of deployed VMs in Abiquo. After you migrate to provider ID, you can perform the following checks:

List the Redis subscriptions, which will use the Provider ID as the unique key
Use the VSM console to check the other entities
If you are using Veeam, log in to the backup server and check the names of the backup jobs, which will now include the ProviderID

After you start Abiquo, log in as the cloud administrator and check VMs, firewalls, load balancers, and so on.