As many here would be no doubt aware, a few weeks ago VMWare released their vSphere 5 product line and with it changed the licensing and specs of what their free ESXi Hypervisor product would allow. Initially they restricted the entire Hypervisor to 8GB RAM Max per CPU on the host, and then due to pressure from the user community upgraded this to 24GB (I think). However in light of this, it sends a clear message to the user community that unless you are willing to fork over thousands per hypervisor to get a commercial license for VMWare, you run the risk that at anytime in the future, this corporation can elect to change specs and render a hypervisor unusable for its intended purpose.
We have about 5 colocated servers that run VMWare ESXi 3.5 on them, with varying amounts of RAM installed and have come to rely on their uptime. Although the product is ok for what we use it for, Proxmox actually offers more in its core product (ie. HA, Backup, Migration, etc.) which are not available in the free VMWare offering. So why others wouldn't mass migrate to Proxmox is beyond comprehension, considering this recent licensing change.
So with that said, I'm trying to find a way to migrate about 20 Linux VMs from ESXi to Proxmox. They all have VMDK files, but using a variety of conversion products (ie. VMWare Converter, Symantec BackupExec, etc.) I can get some form of backup of these VMs. I just need to know how I can get from VMWare Host to OpenVZ or KVM without having to completely rebuild a server from scratch.
I know the Wiki references this, but it doesn't go into much detail on the process and I think that at this important time, it would be information that would be of great value to others. If I can find a simple, systematic way of doing this, I'd be happy to blog or post my process for others to follow in the future, but I'd like to start with some feedback from the community on how others may have done this already.
Thanks
Myles
We have about 5 colocated servers that run VMWare ESXi 3.5 on them, with varying amounts of RAM installed and have come to rely on their uptime. Although the product is ok for what we use it for, Proxmox actually offers more in its core product (ie. HA, Backup, Migration, etc.) which are not available in the free VMWare offering. So why others wouldn't mass migrate to Proxmox is beyond comprehension, considering this recent licensing change.
So with that said, I'm trying to find a way to migrate about 20 Linux VMs from ESXi to Proxmox. They all have VMDK files, but using a variety of conversion products (ie. VMWare Converter, Symantec BackupExec, etc.) I can get some form of backup of these VMs. I just need to know how I can get from VMWare Host to OpenVZ or KVM without having to completely rebuild a server from scratch.
I know the Wiki references this, but it doesn't go into much detail on the process and I think that at this important time, it would be information that would be of great value to others. If I can find a simple, systematic way of doing this, I'd be happy to blog or post my process for others to follow in the future, but I'd like to start with some feedback from the community on how others may have done this already.
Thanks
Myles
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