Migrating VMware VMs to Proxmox

[gun.k]

I’m currently planning a migration of 10 virtual machines (VMs) from a VMware environment to Proxmox. The VMs are part of a production environment, so minimizing downtime is crucial. I’d like to perform the migration in a way that allows for an incremental approach, where the bulk of the data is transferred initially, and then only the changes data are synced to the final cutover

My Questions:​

1. Is it possible to perform an incremental migration from VMware to Proxmox? If so, what tools or workflows are recommended?
2. Can live migration be incorporated into the process to reduce downtime during the final cutover?
3. Are there any tools, scripts, or best practices that make this transition smoother?
4. What’s the most efficient way to ensure the migrated VMs retain their original configuration (networking, storage mappings, etc.)?
5. Are there limitations I should be aware of when migrating specific VM configurations (e.g., snapshots, specific disk formats)?

Thank you in advance for your help!

 

[mas-ts]

Hi

We have moved around 160 Ubuntu VM's (Some windows and some other OS's) from ESXi to Proxmox in short what we did was to mount the ESXi storage using the proxmox import built in. (https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Automatic_ESXi_Import:_Step_by_Step)
We saw migration speed around 150-250MB/s (2Gbit) on a 25Gbit network pr Proxmox node

In short take one by one: (Ubuntu)

• Remove any snapshots and mounted ISO's
• Make sure the system have VirtIO support (Ubuntu do out of the box)
• Change network in netplan from ens192 to ens18, and apply the new netplan config
• Shutdown VM
• Start import
• Change settings
• Boot VM

Your Questions:

1. Not sure if you can?
2. Yes there is live migration where the VM is started on Proxmox but we tried it and it took over 20 min for the VM to boot, and if the import fails you lose data
3. We did not find any for our 160 move, so i think 10 you can manage without
4. Use the Proxmox import tool but customization will be required as you will need to set the VLAN and so on
5. You can not import VM's with snapshots or ISO's mounted if you plan to use VirtIO make sure OS is supported and drivers installed (Ubuntu minimal have default support, but windows do not, and if using more than one disk on windows VirtIO storage was a problem for us so we was using the VMware PVSCSI controller for that)