I went through a lot of frustration trying to figure this out and while there might be a better way than mine, I thought I should share my method in case it can help someone else. All of the articles and documentation I came across were slightly different and it took a while to come to this. Someone else may have documented my exact but if they did, I wish I could have found that.
If anything, it might lead you on a better track to figure out the rest.
First, don't bother installing Proxmox as a vm on ESX. Doing so prevents Proxmox from gaining full access to the CPU. While it does install and you can convert, you cannot test the conversion process from end to end so you're better off installing onto its own hardware.
Update: BTW, I was told that this does work IF you can enable VT. In my case, I wasn't able to as the host is in production.
In this case, I only converted Linux Centos 7 and 8. I should have done a Windows but haven't needed one yet.
ESX is always 6.7.
Since my vms are in production, I didn't want to change anything on them so I cloned them.
The vms must be turned off when running the importer so it's best to clone it or make a backup.
Fire up the backup and use that as your work copy until you get comfortable with this process or even improve upon mine.
I took an esx centos-7 vm and cloned it.
During the cloning process, I removed the network card/s, CDROM and USB.
I fired it up using DHCP and then removed the vm tools and installed qemu.
# yum install qemu-guest-agent -y
# /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl
Uninstalling the tar installation of VMware Tools.
# shutdown -h now
I then imported it to the Proxmox server from ESX
# ovftool vi://root@192.168.1.243:443/c7-test .
I then imported it to Proxmox service
# qm importovf 103 c7-test/c7-test.ovf local-zfs
I then went to Options and changed the OS type to Linux 5.x.
I then went to Hardware and changed the SCSI controller to VirtIO SCSI, no other changes.
I then added a network card, VirtIO (paravirtualized)
I then started the vm and went to the console.
It fired right up with the network and reachable from ssh.
I then followed the exact same steps with a centos-8 vm.
With Centos-8, this time I had to use UEFI BIOS and it came right up again.
There was a little problem with the interface name being changed to ens18 from ens192.
I changed the file name from 192 to 18, edited the content and used ifup ens18 and network came up.
The network works with either VirtIO (paravirtualized) or E1000.
Hope this can help someone.
If anything, it might lead you on a better track to figure out the rest.
First, don't bother installing Proxmox as a vm on ESX. Doing so prevents Proxmox from gaining full access to the CPU. While it does install and you can convert, you cannot test the conversion process from end to end so you're better off installing onto its own hardware.
Update: BTW, I was told that this does work IF you can enable VT. In my case, I wasn't able to as the host is in production.
In this case, I only converted Linux Centos 7 and 8. I should have done a Windows but haven't needed one yet.
ESX is always 6.7.
Since my vms are in production, I didn't want to change anything on them so I cloned them.
The vms must be turned off when running the importer so it's best to clone it or make a backup.
Fire up the backup and use that as your work copy until you get comfortable with this process or even improve upon mine.
I took an esx centos-7 vm and cloned it.
During the cloning process, I removed the network card/s, CDROM and USB.
I fired it up using DHCP and then removed the vm tools and installed qemu.
# yum install qemu-guest-agent -y
# /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl
Uninstalling the tar installation of VMware Tools.
# shutdown -h now
I then imported it to the Proxmox server from ESX
# ovftool vi://root@192.168.1.243:443/c7-test .
I then imported it to Proxmox service
# qm importovf 103 c7-test/c7-test.ovf local-zfs
I then went to Options and changed the OS type to Linux 5.x.
I then went to Hardware and changed the SCSI controller to VirtIO SCSI, no other changes.
I then added a network card, VirtIO (paravirtualized)
I then started the vm and went to the console.
It fired right up with the network and reachable from ssh.
I then followed the exact same steps with a centos-8 vm.
With Centos-8, this time I had to use UEFI BIOS and it came right up again.
There was a little problem with the interface name being changed to ens18 from ens192.
I changed the file name from 192 to 18, edited the content and used ifup ens18 and network came up.
The network works with either VirtIO (paravirtualized) or E1000.
Hope this can help someone.
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