Recently I was investigating the migration of an external vRealize Orchestrator instance to an embedded instance inside vRealize Automation. But for testing purposes I didn’t want to use the production appliances… So I had to create a test vRA and vRO appliance.

I started with vRO. The control Center has the option to export and import the configuration. At first the import didn’t work because of insufficient memory. But after increasing the available memory and importing the configuration from my production appliance, I still was missing important stuff like workflows.

For some reason I didn’t think of the obvious solution: get the files from the production appliance and import them in the test environment. This gave me an EXACT copy. So the next step was to change the host name and the IP configuration.

I started the imported VM (disconnect the nic) and logged on to the console. Then I ran this command:

/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

This will let you change the hostname (option 3) and to change the IP address (option 6).

Shutdown the appliance, connect the nic and start it up again. Now you have a copy of your production vRO appliance to work with. I didn’t test it but this might also work with vRA.