Migrating VMs from VMware to Proxmox via OVFTool

[user73937393]

Hi Guys,

I am migrating my VMs from ESXi to Proxmox. We're 75% of the way through the migration and are now ready to migrate the really large VMs. Prior to this we'd run the following command on the Proxmox host, exporting the virtual machine to OVF:

ovftool vi://ip.address.for.esxi/virtual.machine.name ./

If I understand this correctly, this would export the VM to OVF, and temporarily store the OVF on the local Proxmox disk.

The problem is that the local Proxmox storage is 500GB, and we're now ready to migrate VMs larger than that.

My question is, can the OVF tool export to a ZFS pool instead of the local storage? And if so, how do we do that? When I run zfs lst below is what I get:

NAME                              USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
example_disk1                     234G  1.53T    96K  /example_disk1
example_disk1/vm-801-disk-0      91.4G  1.60T  16.3G  -
example_disk1/vm-811-disk-0      40.6G  1.55T  13.9G  -
example_disk1/vm-812-disk-0       102G  1.60T  30.5G  -
rpool                            10.2G   436G   104K  /rpool
rpool/ROOT                       9.69G   436G    96K  /rpool/ROOT
rpool/ROOT/pve-1                 9.69G   436G  9.69G  /
rpool/data                         96K   436G    96K  /rpool/data
rpool/var-lib-vz                  494M   436G   494M  /var/lib/vz
rust01                            550G  6.59T    96K  /rust01
rust01/vm-800-disk-0             60.9G  6.60T  46.3G  -
rust01/vm-810-disk-0             91.4G  6.64T  42.3G  -
rust01/vm-813-disk-0             91.4G  6.65T  27.2G  -
rust01/vm-814-disk-0             91.4G  6.64T  41.0G  -
rust01/vm-814-disk-1              122G  6.59T   120G  -
rust01/vm-910-disk-0             91.4G  6.63T  52.4G  -
rust01/vm-910-disk-1             1.02G  6.59T    56K  -

If I want to write the OVF to rust01, should I just run ovftool vi://ip.address.for.esxi/virtual.machine.name /rust01?

As I mentioned above, we're 75% of the way through the migration and we wait to make sure I don't accidentally overwrite something in ZFS/Proxmox and destroy the VMs already migrated to Proxmox.

 

[bbgeek17]

If I have my ZFS terminology correct, you are going to need to create a dataset within that volume as a temporary storage, mount it and then write the ovf output. Then process the conversion to your storage of choice.
In theory you could write it directly to new ZVol (which I think your existing disks are). This would involve multiple Standard Input redirections. Its up to you if you want to experiment with it...

PS yes, rust01 is a dataset, which is already a mounted filesystem. You can drop your ovf export there too.

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