Migrating ESXI VMDK which is spanning 2 pysical HDDs Help

alfiethecat99

New Member
Mar 21, 2025
1
0
1
I am in the process of migrating from ESXI to Proxmox.
For the most part, this was easy enough. I managed to migrate all my VMs without much issue.

However, my Plex Debian VM has 2 'disks'. The smaller OS disk and the larger 12TB media disk.
The OS disk was migrated/converted very easily.
However, I am now stuck on the media disk.

The media disk on ESXI is actually spanning 2x physical HDDs in the server. A 6TB and an 8TB - 12TB is used.
I have a new 16TB disk I would like to migrate everything to. This 16TB Disk is recognized by Proxmox, and I can simply add a 14TB RAW disk to the VM, my plan would be to copy all the media files over to the new RAW disk or do a conversion (Which will take multiple days by my calculations).

So on Proxmox, I can see the disks and partitions for SDA1 and SDB1 where the media exists - All good.
root@proxmox:~# fdisk -l | grep VMFS
/dev/sda1 2048 15628050432 15628048385 7.3T VMware VMFS
/dev/sdb1 2048 11721041920 11721039873 5.5T VMware VMFS

I am using vmfuse6 to mount the drives, and then taking the VMDK and converting.

root@proxmox:~# vmfs6-fuse /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
VMFS version: 6
VMFS: Unable to read FS information <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< I guess this is an issue?
Unable to open filesystem
root@proxmox:~# vmfs6-fuse /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
VMFS version: 6
root@proxmox:~# cd /mnt/sdb1

I checked sdb1 and I can see the VMDK:
root@proxmox:/mnt/sdb1/Debian# ls -lah
total 13T
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 72K Mar 20 16:03 .
drwxr-xr-t 5 root root 72K Dec 19 2023 ..
-rw------- 1 root root 13T Mar 21 05:02 Debian_1-flat.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 508 Mar 20 16:03 Debian_1.vmdk

How it see's the full 13TB VMDK, I have no idea... Because this disk is only 5.5TB!

If I start the conversion process, I assume this will fail?

How can I migrate this to my new 16TB disk whilst preserving the original VMDK files / data on sda and sdb in case I need to reboot back into ESXI and have everything in tact?

----

Ideally, I do not want to do a conversion of the 13TB VMDK -> RAW - I would rather copy the individual media files manually (Copy TV-series X first since it is actively being watched, and then copy all movies, and then copy individual series) - But, if this is not possible, I can do the full conversion.

But I am worried that the conversion will fail due to my ESXI extend.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
 
It is recommended to manually copy the media files to the new 16TB disk instead of converting the VMDK to avoid file system issues while preserving the integrity of the original VMFS disk in case of rollback to ESXi.
 
If your setup allows, you might want to consider using Vinchin Backup & Recovery to migrate ESXi VMs to Proxmox. It’s entirely up to you, of course. If interested, feel free to try its free version. I’d greatly appreciate any feedback you might have!