Migration from Vmware

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miket85

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Proxmox Subscriber
Apr 1, 2026
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We have recently migrated 18 hosts from esxi to proxmox for our Citrix VDI estate and so far very pleased with the results. This was straightforward as everything is imaged from a single gold image, and pxe booted to a cloned disk.

We are now exploring moving our Windows server estate (250+ VM's) but a rebuild and migrate of each VM is a big undertaking. So far we have explored a few options of how we could move our existing workloads without rebuild, but results are varied

Migrate using the built in VMware to Proxmox tool (this is offline only and with a production server we can't afford for this to be offline).
Backup & restore the virtual machine from esxi to proxmox using Veeam. This does work, but to make the machine bootable I had to change the disk from SCSI to SATA. We then remove VMware tools (which had to be forcefully remove as tools didn't detect it running in a VM, and then we could install the VirtIO drivers). Unfortunately, if we tried changing back to SCSI after this the VM would just blue screen and fail to boot unless left with SATA.


We've seen that Proxmox now support Live Import which we are next to try, but i'm assuming we will face similar problems with the disk drivers when Proxmox trys to start the VM?


I thought i'd open it upto the Proxmox community and ask what other members have done to migrate from esxi to Proxmox?

Thanks
 
I put together some links in another post:
J

Post in thread 'Migration from DELL VxRail to Proxmox'

Following links are propably of interest:
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The how-to section of the wiki have some pointers too e.g. for Server 2025:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Windows_2025_guest_best_practices

Supaman said:
In Short: you can Import the running VM including driver change, and after that only changed data needs to be resysnced.
Click to expand...
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Attach_Disk_&_Move_Disk_(minimal_downtime) is more involved but with that no data needs to be synced
 
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Post in thread 'Migrating Windows to Proxmox/Virtio SCSI single device without intermediary IDE/sata boot drive'

@Falk R. made an "install.bat" script which use the devcon.exe Microsoft utility to create the phantom/fake scsi controller.
This allow booting directly in PVE with Virtio SCSI disk.
Just tried today.
Download the virtio win mod drivers ISO , the run "install.bat" , backup/clone to PVE. it's straightforward.

There is a powershell script too, which does the same thing ( https://github.com/croit/load-virtio-scsi-on-boot/ )
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miket85 said:
Backup & restore the virtual machine from esxi to proxmox using Veeam. This does work, but to make the machine bootable I had to change the disk from SCSI to SATA. We then remove VMware tools (which had to be forcefully remove as tools didn't detect it running in a VM, and then we could install the VirtIO drivers). Unfortunately, if we tried changing back to SCSI after this the VM would just blue screen and fail to boot unless left with SATA.
Click to expand...
AFAIK, Veeam 13.1 introduces new features that will help integrating all the required stuff in a restore on PVE. Maybe try the upgrade and some problems may just be solved.
 
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