Migration from ESXi 6.7 to Proxmox

[showiproute]

Hello everyone,

due to a big issue last weekend I finally decided to leave VMWares "walled garden" and also move my main server to Proxmox.
But I have a several question to know any issues that might occure:

- Is there a special update process or is it just simple said

apt update && apt upgrade

?
- Is it possible to live migrate virtual disks from real HDD 1 to real HDD2 without any downtime?

For the migration process I will get a 2nd server with Proxmox as hypervisor but primarily running Free/TrueNAS as VM to have the possiblity to move VMs from ESXi and format the VMFS to ext4, zfs whatever.
Is it possible/recommended to passthrough real HDDs to the VM?


Thanks,
Mathias

 

[Kevin Meijer]

I've been migrating from ESXi the past few weeks, so i've got a bit of experience in this area.

Regarding updates, yes, its that easy. It can also be done from the web interface.

Live migration is supported, but i am unsure how Proxmox handles moving disks during a live migration since I am only using shared storage.

I've written a CLI tool for this conversion, what the tool does is it converts all the VMDKs to a raw file, creates a Proxmox VM with the same settings, and imports the raw files as disks.

This is what I use for the VMDK conversion:

qemu-img convert -f vmdk '/path/to/vmdk' -O raw '/path/to/output'

And this is what i use for the import:

qm importdisk $VMID '/path/to/output' $STORAGE

Where $VMID is the Id of the VM and $STORAGE the name of the storage to import it to.

Regarding passthrough, i have no experience with it, but i think its possible.[/CODE]

 

[showiproute]

Hi Kevi,

thanks for your information regarding the move ov the VMs itself.
I think the qemu-img will be a very useful command.

The only painpoint in general I have is VMFS as this is not really compatible with any other OS.

 

[aaron]

- Is there a special update process or is it just simple said apt update && apt upgrade

You can run the upgrades via the GUI. There is an Update panel if you select a node. But please be aware that should you want to do it yourself in the CLI run the following commands:

apt update
apt full-upgrade

running only apt upgrade will not resolve changed and new dependencies and you might end up with a broken system. Should it happen to you, an apt install --fix-broken and apt full-upgrade should usually get it back in working condition.

 

[Lapointemar]

For the migration part you can use sshfs to map the the esxi datastore on the proxmox server then you can directly use the impor command provide by kevin (you save a copy step)

Or if the vm is big enough you can map a nfs on the esxi from proxmox
1:Then take a snapshot of vmware vm
2:copy base snapshot disk
3: shutdown vm
4:Copy snapshot disk and other file
5:de register vm and registrig vm from nfs mount
6: supress snapshot
7:start vm with vmdk and migrate live storage to native format
7: or take time import vmdk directly to native storage

I do that with old server with multi tera disk, when server are realy slow and no 10g available

 

[UdoB]

Not mentioned yet: in a Debian guest I did

• apt purge open-vm-tools
• apt install qemu-guest-agent # and set it to "Enabled" in "Options"

Best regards

 

[showiproute]

Hello and thank you all for your comments - so far I have a new server
A refurbished Lenovo P510 Thinkstation with a 32GB RAM - unfortunately it only features four possible drive inputs but this should be fine for me (at least for now).


Anyone have ever played around with vmfs-tools (https://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/vmfs6-tools/download).
I removed a drive from my current ESXi6.7 and was able to mount it without any issues.

If this would work than it would reduce copying VMs from old server to new one and back a lot.

 

[showiproute]

And another question:
I recognized that there is a V2V tutorial but this copies the whole VM including the virtual disk.
My issue is that I have a few big VM with multiple VMDKs stored on different disks.

Is there a possiblity to copy/paste just the VM configurations and convert/mount the VMDKs in a different step?

 

[slanbuas]

And another question:
I recognized that there is a V2V tutorial but this copies the whole VM including the virtual disk.
My issue is that I have a few big VM with multiple VMDKs stored on different disks.

Is there a possiblity to copy/paste just the VM configurations and convert/mount the VMDKs in a different step?

As far as I can remember the tests I've done on that subject with an older version on pve, Yes you can use the vmdk directly (as Lapointemar said) as long as it is accessible from a datastore and migrate the storage (or qemu convert) at a later time.

 

[Lapointemar]

As far as I can remember the tests I've done on that subject with an older version on pve, Yes you can use the vmdk directly (as Lapointemar said) as long as it is accessible from a datastore and migrate the storage (or qemu convert) at a later time.

Note to that (using directly the vmdk) depending on source storage iops your vm gona take a big performance hit before and more during migration

 

[showiproute]

No, I won't run any VMs with vmdk images - I just need to move them to different HDDs while formating empty ones.
Is it better to format the disks with ZFS file system (no RAID would be used) or should I stick with "classic" EXT4?

 

[Lapointemar]

Personaly i go zfs way they have to many good thing (L2ARC, snapshot CoW daly auto rotating,replication,...)

 

[showiproute]

I agree - I was not sure if ZFS is "recommended" so far.
Do you have enabled compression?

 

[Lapointemar]

The lz4 compression is a my knolegwment activate by defaut and i have never need to disable it

 

[aaron]

ZFS compression should be on by default. The little bit of CPU time needed is usually much less compared to the time saved by writing / reading less data to/from disk.

 

[Dominic]

And another question:
I recognized that there is a V2V tutorial but this copies the whole VM including the virtual disk.
My issue is that I have a few big VM with multiple VMDKs stored on different disks.

Is there a possiblity to copy/paste just the VM configurations and convert/mount the VMDKs in a different step?

qm importovf is basically

1. Copy configuration
2. qm importdisk for each disk

The first step, copy configuration, is not available standalone. So you will have to create a VM and manually set the values and then use qm importdisk a couple of times. At the end of the tutorial, there are some lines about that. See also the man page of qm, scroll down to importdisk and importovf.