Moving a VM back on-premises or on source

When you move a VM to the cloud, a base snapshot is taken. When you move a VM back to the source, different behaviors take place, depending on the storage policy configured for that VM.

Notes:

  • Forced move back: If there is a sustained cloud outage, you can force the VM to run on-premises or on the source. For VMs that use the write-back policy, this moves the VM back to on-premises using its latest consistency checkpoint. This results in data loss up to the last stored checkpoint.
  • As a safety measure, the base snapshot of a VM that runs in the cloud using the write-back policy is not deleted automatically when the Force option is used. The base snapshot can be deleted manually when verified to be no longer needed.
  • When moving from AWS to Google Cloud, write-back is not available. In this case, moving the VM back to AWS restarts the original VMs with disks as they were when beginning migration.

Using Migrate for Compute Engine Manager

  1. Sign in to your Migrate for Compute Engine Manager.
  2. Click the Migration Waves tab.
  3. When prompted for a username and password, use apiuser as the username.
  4. Click the monitor icon of the relevant wave.
  5. Select the VM you wish to return on-premises and click Move Back.
    Screenshot of Move Back button (click to enlarge)

Using vCenter

  1. In the vSphere Web Client, select the virtual machine.
  2. Right-click the VM and select Velostrata Operations > Run On-Premises.
    Screenshot of VM icon (click to enlarge)
    Screenshot of Run on Premises dialog box (click to enlarge)
  3. If you want to force the process, check the Force run on-premises box.
  4. Enter the confirmation code to confirm the action.
  5. Click OK. VMs returning from the cloud are automatically started on-premises.

To view the process of running the VM on source, you can use the Cloud Instance Information portlet on the VM Summary page. You can also monitor the vSphere task.

Screenshot of Cloud Instance Information (click to enlarge)