Boot disk missing when importing from ESXi

[underdpt]

Hi everyone,

I've been doing some migrations from various ESXi servers to proxmox, and so far so good, everything went surprisingly smooth. These are vanilla ESXi servers and VMs without any complications.

But on one of these imports, I'm hitting a wall: the import wizard only detects one of the drives. The VM has two drives, thin provisioned, boot has 20Gb and data drive has 100Gb. Inspecting the vm configuration shows nothing extrange. I'm attaching the VM config files.

So, I've been searching the docs, the forum and the net, but found nothing similar, so I have no clue how to fix this. Now I'm trying to export an OVF to check if that import path works.

Any hint? Thanks!

 

[sw-omit]

Been doing a lot of ESX to PVE migrations lately, but I too have never heard of this one (still looking through your data)
One suggestion though:
Have you tried making a "clone" of the VM in ESX with just the boot-drive and seeing if:
a) the Cloning-process works
b) You can import that VM.

If you can, you could always just import them as two VM's, and then from the temporary data-only VM detaching the disk and assigning/attaching it to the boot-only VM to have a full system again.
You Might have to "online" the disk within the system itself still though, or at least I had to on Windows in the few cases where I had systems with multiple physical disks (and I detached/re-attached them to turn them from SATA to SCSI)

EDIT: Just noticed that it's Ubuntu, so more then likely the disk will be found right away, but that said I haven't done any linux-based system-migrations with more then 1 disk

 

[sw-omit]

Checking your file, and even creating a quick linux vm to get a clean vmx file, there is but ONE thing that I found that I could suspect to be the issue:

(...)
scsi0:0.filename = "ownCloud.vmdk"
(...)
scsi0:1.fileName = "ownCloud_1.vmdk"
(...)

The N in fileName for the scsi-drive for the primairy disk isn't capitilized, so perhaps the importer can't find the line and such can't find the file.

Linux is always very case-sensitive by default, so I wouldn't be surprised if that is the case here too.
I'm expecting that the cause of it being with a lowecase-N is found in the option virtualHW.productCompatibility = "hosted" which according to Reddit [1] is found for the VM being made in a desktop- (or at least non-esx-) environment at first.
I'm suspecting you're making use of a template for a VM that was made in a stand-alone version first, causing the "wrong" capitalisation, which isn't causing issues for ESX, but is for the importer.

I unfortunately can't test this for you (don't have an esx and proxmox-combo ready, since I'm just done with all of those, but it should be an easy thing to check.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/ivteyz/vmx_additional_configuration_options_what_does/

 

[underdpt]

Oh my!

That's the issue, that lowercase 'n' it's messing the import. I've just tested and it recognizes the two drives once changed. I checked all the values of the .vms file, but not the keys.

Thank you so much for taking a look at it! Please PM on how to send you a beer! (not kidding ;-) )

 

[sw-omit]

Oh my!

That's the issue, that lowercase 'n' it's messing the import. I've just tested and it recognizes the two drives once changed. I checked all the values of the .vms file, but not the keys.

Good to know. Once I'm back in the Office on monday or tuesday, I'll also send in a bug-report for it through my supplier (unless someone from Prox already sees it before then ) so others don't run into this either. Might want to tag this thread as [solved] before then though, for others that might have the issue to find

Thank you so much for taking a look at it! Please PM on how to send you a beer! (not kidding ;-) )

No worries, it was a nice brain-teaser for me, glad to help out.
Also, I don't drink (never have, probably never will) so just pour that beer for yourself and cheer it to a nice weekend with another problem solved