ESXi 4.1 --> ProxMox

[ciairo]

Hi There...

as mentioned in the title i want to convert a large amount of servers from the ESXi 4.1 to the ProxMox environment.

using the ProxMox wiki i tried what was written on it (VMware to Proxmox VE (KVM) ) moding a few steps..

1. i already had everything on an IDE environment so i skiped that part

2. no vmware tools installed - so i skiped that as well

3. i prepared the vdisk using: "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\vmware-vdiskmanager" -r win2003.vmdk -t 0 win2003-pve.vmdk"

4. i created a new empty virtual mashine on ProxMox, with the settings (pcnet as a nic, and as image format vmdk) - i chose to use the vmdk settings to hurry up! not because its a must!

5. copied the "VM-pve.vmdk to my ProMox server in the directory of the new created machine

6. i linked the original VM's name with the copied converted VM and started the VM via WEB GUI...

it worked fine and the VM seems to run with no trouble... now,

my question in this:
is it neccesary to do the other steps:

( qemu-img convert -f vmdk win2003-pve.vmdk -O qcow2 win2003-pve.qcow2 )

( dd if=win2003-pve.vmdk of=/dev/VG_iscsi/vm-102-disk-1)

what does the quemu-img convert function do? and does not using it have any limitations? (Performance, Stability etc...)

thanks

ciairo

 

[tom]

the steps you mentioned are not mandatory. vmdk format is not that widely used on Proxmox VE but looks working for most. For best performance, you should use block devices anyways (e.g. LVM).

 

[escoreal]

3. i prepared the vdisk using: "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\vmware-vdiskmanager" -r win2003.vmdk -t 0 win2003-pve.vmdk"

[/SIZE]

Hi,

what vmdk format are your disks (win2003.vmdk)? If there is one big flat file (preallocated virtual disk) it is already "raw" and could be renamed (*.raw) or directly copied to LVM with dd.

esco

 

[ciairo]

OK, first i want to say thank's for the answers!

now,

are situation is this, we have a bunch of servers on a external disk (downloaded the VM's from the ESXi via Storage browser) and we want to write a batch to convert them all to the ProxMox environment - the files that we downloaded from ESXi are in "flat-format" and every VM disk is the total amount of the disk size (50GB) witch is strange because as we created the disks we set them in "thin-disk-mode".

how would be the best and fastest way to convert all of our VM's (35 machines) to ProxMox environment?

are situation:
- we have a C3000 Blade with ESXi 4.1 with the 35 machines devided by 5 Blades.
- we already have installed ProxMox on 5 Towers with enough power to hold them

what do you suggest?

i appreciate the hint's about using LVM, but all of our servers have a personalized kernel with LVM disabled and the OS is a redhat3 so it would mean compiling all of of our machines again - witch is not an option because we have to respect our requesits.

thanks

ciairo!

 

[escoreal]

Hi,

you could rename the *-flat.vmdk to *.raw and use it (or dd it to an logical volume). This is what we did.

I mean using LVM on the Proxmox hosts. The guests only see an ide/scsi/virtio device.

esco