Creating and modifying runbooks

This page describes how to create runbooks that define the VMs in a wave.

Generating runbook templates

Runbooks are created from the Velostrata Manager. The system queries your VMware or AWS for VMs and generates an CSV for you to edit. You can edit the CSV, defining the migration VMs and order or migration and other characteristics for your Migration Wave.

  1. Navigate to the Velostrata Manager. Sign in as apiuser, and then click the Migration Waves icon. Use the password you set when you created your Velostrata Manager.
  2. After signing in, click Generate Runbook.
  3. When the menu appears, select your Source (vSphere or AWS).

Using on-premises VMs (vSphere) as the source

  1. [Required] For the Source Datacenter, select the on-premises VMware data center whose inventory you'd like to export. This list of options is automatically populated from vCenter when registering the Velostrata vCenter Plug-in.
  2. [Optional] Select the Target Cloud Extension that will host your migrated VMs by default. You can modify this later by editing the runbook.
  3. [Optional] For the Target Network, the Populate with Cloud Extension Defaults is checked by default. If you would like to use another VPC network, uncheck this box. This procedure pre-populates the target subnet and GCP network tags with Cloud Extension defaults for workloads. You can modify this setting later by editing the runbook.
  4. Click Create. This will download the Runbook CSV to your computer.

Using AWS as the source

  1. Select the required Source Cloud Details with the VMs you want to migrate.
  2. Enter one or more Filter by Source Tags by entering Name and Value pairs. These name and value pairs of AWS instance tags are used to find VMs. For example, if you had an instance tagged with the "WORKLOAD" key and the "CRM" value in AWS, you would use "WORKLOAD" for the Name and "CRM" for the Value.
  3. The Value field supports the * wildcard operator. For example, entering "WORKLOAD" in the Name field and "*" in the Value field selects all instances with a key of "WORKLOAD."
  4. [Optional] For Target Network, the Populate with Cloud Extension Defaults is selected by default. If you want to use another VPC network, clear this box. This procedure pre-populates the target subnet and GCP network tags with Cloud Extension defaults for workloads. You can modify this setting later by editing the runbook.
  5. Click Create. You are prompted to save the runbook CSV.

For more information, see Configure AWS as a Source.

Modifying runbooks

You can customize the runbook CSV in the editor or spreadsheet program of your choice. All of the runbook CSV values are defined in the runbook reference

Third-party or custom tools

If you need more refined filtering, sorting, or segmenting of VMs and applications, custom tooling to create or edit runbooks may help. You can create these with your preferred languages and tools; Velostrata accepts runbooks from any CSV that contains the required fields.

In addition, several third-party migration discovery and planning solutions offer built-in support to produce and execute Velostrata runbooks through the Velostrata API.

Loading runbooks into a wave

After you configure a wave in a runbook inventory file, you can load it into Velostrata. To do so, click New Wave from the top bar of the Velostrata Runbook Automation Page.

  1. Name the Wave.
  2. Click Choose File to choose the CSV for this Wave's runbook.
  3. Click Save.

Velostrata validates the runbook CSV for structural problems, such as missing required columns, and uploads it.

Validating a runbook

Before taking any action on a wave by creating jobs, the runbook must be validated. Validation finds semantic errors such as:

  • Nonexistent VM IDs
  • Connectivity to GCP, the on-premises vSphere environment, and/or AWS
  • Invalid Cloud Extension IDs
  • Google Cloud Instance types
  • Invalid Google Cloud Cloud Details
  • Google Cloud Subnets
  • Google Cloud Projects
  • Google Cloud Service Accounts. Only custom Service Accounts are supported. Using built-in GCP service accounts causes validation to fail.

Validation must complete without errors in order to add jobs.

To perform validation, click Action > Validate. Then click Yes to validate the runbook. The validation may take several minutes to complete, and when completed, a validation status column appears in the table. If a validation fails, click Failed within the row to see the failure messages.

If validation fails, change your environment settings (for example, the Cloud Details loaded in Velostrata Manager) or fix your runbook and reload it. Then re-run validation until it succeeds.

Editing a runbook in a wave

How to access the Update Runbook prompt from the Waves UI

To edit a wave:

  1. Select Action > Update Runbook.
  2. Choose a CSV file and click Save.
  3. Re-validate the new runbook.

When editing a wave, the history of previous operations on that wave is maintained. You can find and download prior runbooks by clicking the value in the Jobs column.

Deleting a wave

You can only delete a wave if a job was never started on it. Instead of deleting a wave, you can move VMs from one wave to another by editing the runbooks for both waves.