How to place a file into local-lvm

[EvanOnEarth]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Proxmox (from VMware) and am looking for some assistance with the filesystem structure from the Proxmox PVE .iso (as opposed to installing proxmox over the top of a base debian install)

preface: This might be a limitation to my knowledge of LVM, so bear with me!

I am trying to use ovftool to bring a VM from my existing ESXi server over to proxmox. The server has 1 drive that is ~1.2TB in size.

The PVE server ended up with the following:

local = 100GB
local-lvm = 6.2TB

So essentially I'm trying to do ovftool vi://root@esxihost.domain.local <local-lvm> so that the .vmdk will actually fit on the server, but I'm not sure that this is even possible given that the partition for local-lvm doesn't appear to be actually mounted to the FS:

oot@pve01:/tmp# lsblk
NAME                         MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda                            8:0    0  6.4T  0 disk
├─sda1                         8:1    0 1007K  0 part
├─sda2                         8:2    0  512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─sda3                         8:3    0  6.4T  0 part
  ├─pve-swap                 253:0    0    8G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
  ├─pve-root                 253:1    0   96G  0 lvm  /
  ├─pve-data_tmeta           253:2    0 15.8G  0 lvm
  │ └─pve-data-tpool         253:4    0  6.2T  0 lvm
  │   ├─pve-data             253:5    0  6.2T  0 lvm
  │   ├─pve-vm--100--disk--0 253:6    0   32G  0 lvm
  │   ├─pve-vm--140--disk--0 253:7    0   32G  0 lvm
  │   └─pve-vm--101--disk--0 253:8    0   32G  0 lvm
  └─pve-data_tdata           253:3    0  6.2T  0 lvm
    └─pve-data-tpool         253:4    0  6.2T  0 lvm
      ├─pve-data             253:5    0  6.2T  0 lvm
      ├─pve-vm--100--disk--0 253:6    0   32G  0 lvm
      ├─pve-vm--140--disk--0 253:7    0   32G  0 lvm
      └─pve-vm--101--disk--0 253:8    0   32G  0 lvm
sr0                           11:0    1 1024M  0 rom

can someone help me figure how I would actually get the .ovf of this large server onto PVE?

 

[t.lamprecht]

Hi,

Did you already checked out the following wiki article:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE#VMware

LVM is providing volumes like a block storage, i.e., like virtual disks. So you cannot "just" mount an LVM volume.

Is the VMWare image on a network attached storage, or you do you access it on the Proxmox VE node?

 

[EvanOnEarth]

Yeah I checked out that article... essentially what I see happening is this:

1) Turn off VM in ESXi
2) run ovftool to create a ovf package on the server and then it transfers the .ovf the .vmdk. the .mf and other files to PVE
3) you run the importovf tool to get the image into PVE

for step#2 it transfers those files to the proxmox server... in my case, this would be a 1.2TB .vmdk which will not fit on anything that is mounted to the FS

the VMware image in on ESXi local storage that is NOT accessable via PVE.... I suppose I could attach a external HDD to the system and move the files to that? -- I do NOT have any NAS solution in the network which is why this is becoming an issue.