January 14th VMware accounced the general availability of VMWare App Volumes 4. App Volumes 4 comes with a new kind of appstacks and makes your 2.x appstacks useless. This means you have to recreate all your appstacks or you can use this Fling “App Volumes Migration Utility”.
This utility migrates your 2.18 appstacks to appstacks in the App Volumes 4 format. The format of appstack in VMware App Volumes 4 have changed in order to provide improved login to desktops among many other features.
This can be downloaded at: https://flings.vmware.com/app-volumes-migration-utility#summary
Before I explain how to use this utility you have to know that there are some limitations:
– Writable Volumes can’t be migrated using this utility
– Migrations of 2.x VDH baseds appstacks are not supported
– All the applications in an 2.x appstack will be migrated as one appbundle
Start the utility with admin acces. The utility prompts to save appstacks storage location and the
migration destination format in the settings page.
Login to the App Volumes Manger server using your credentials. If https is used for communicating with AVM, self-signed certificate
should be imported from App Volumes Manger to the machine having the migration utility installed.
Procedure to import the self-signed certificate from AVM
1 Copy the self-signed certificate from [C:\Program Files
(x86)\CloudVolumes\Manager\nginx\conf\appvol_self_vmware.com.crt] to the computer where the
migration utility is installed.
2 Import the self-signed certificate to the computer where the migration utility is installed.
a On the computer, start MMC (mmc.exe).
b Add the Certificates snap-in for the computer account and manage certificates for the local
computer.
c Import the self-signed certificate into Trusted Root Certification Authorities > Certificates.
The utility then lists the 2.x appstacks that are accessible to that App Volumes Manager server, if there are more
apsptacks than that can be accommodated in a single page, appstacks would be accommodated across
multiple pages.
You can select one or more appstacks for migration. Once an appstack is submitted for migration, the
utility will show that migration is in progress and will report back the status of migration.
Once migration is successful, migration utility generates .json, .VMDK and/or .VHD files based on the
migration format chosen in the settings page. Migrated appstack is available in the VMDK / VHD file.
At last it’s time to import the appstack to you App Volumes Manger 4 server:
In order to import appstacks to the AV 4.0 server, you need to copy the .VMDK and .json to the
ppv\packages folder in the installed location of the AVM sever. Once the files are copied, you need to
logon to AV 4.0 using a browser and select “Upload prepackaged volumes” (available in Configuration ->
Storage tabs)
Once the upload is completed, you should import the appstacks from the datastore location (used for
uploading VMDKs). After import is done, you should see the migrated appstacks in the Application Tab
of the AV 4.0. Now this appstack can be used in AV 4.0 environment.
