I recently made some changes to my home lab and had to create a new Cluster because of my EVC mode when I was faced with migrating my vC Ops vApp to the new cluster.  I moved the hosts over, but the vApp wouldn’t go with them like the virtual machines did.

As you can see, I have a vApp but no virtual machines and I need to move it to the “Management” Cluster Group.

My first attempt was to export the vApp to an OVF file and reimport it to the new cluster which failed with an error.

After doing some looking and finding this very useful knowledge base article, it was obvious that I needed to create a new virtual machine as a place holder.

Export your vApp to an OVF

The first thing you should do is check the timezone, IP Addresses and virtual networks that your VMs inside of the vApp.  You’ll need to supply this information again later.

Next, Create a virtual machine inside of the vApp and use the same network that your previous Virtual Machines were using.  (I should note, that if you’re doing this before you’ve moved your VMs to the new cluster, it might not be necessary to create this temporary virtual machine.  For my temp VM you can see that I set my memory and hard disk levels very low since this is a fake VM with no operating system.  I also made sure to configure the Nic to use the same virtual network that my VMs from the original vApp were on.  This is how we eliminate the error I had above.

When you’re all done you should see the new VM under your vApp.

Now, we can export the vApp to an OVF by right clicking on the powered off vApp and choosing “export  OVF Template”.  Save it to someplace on your hard drive.

When the vApp has been exported, you can delete the vApp from the old cluster.

Import OVF Template

Now we will navigate to our new cluster, right click and choose “Deploy OVF Template”.  Choose the file location that you exported the vApp to.

You’ll be handed off to a wizard that is straight forward enough that I won’t go through all of it, but two screens do need to be modified from the defaults.  The first of which is the “Setup Networks” section.  Of course, be sure to select the correct destination network, but the important part is to change the IP allocation Policy from “DHCP” to “Static-Manual”.

The very next screen you come to will need you to change the timezone, and set the IP addresses of the UI VM and the Analytics VM.  We collected all of this information at the very beginning of this post.

Click finish to deploy the vApp.

Cleanup

Now that we’ve imported the vApp to the new cluster, you’ll have your temp virtual machine still in the vApp.  We need to move the UI VM and Analytics VM back to this new vApp.

Once that’s done, you can go ahead and delete the “Temp” VM that we used during the migration.  Power on your vApp and you’re back in business!