Thanks for this tool. And thanks to mram for the ESXi 6.5 soap setting workaround that enabled it to work in my VSphere 6.7U3 (ESXi 6.5U3) environment.
Here are my observations mixed with questions:
- My vmdk files on the ESXi hosts are thin provisioned disks. Even if I fstrim inside the guest and use vmkfstools -K to "Punch Holes" in the .vmdk file before running this import wizard, the importer seems to be copying and consuming the full provisioned space. This causes the import to take much longer. Could something be devised to skip the holes? Veeam Backup talks to VCenter and is able to only transfer the consumed size of thin-providioned volumes so maybe this could be an enhancement to the this import wizard?
- The resulting "disk" (on Ceph) did not have the discard option set. I double-checked on my next import (running now) and when preparing the import there did not seem to be an option to set that on the disk in the import UI. Would be a nice touch but not can always be set after import so not needed unless connected with my question above.
- My first import was slow. A 500GB thin disk VM took the importer 3.5 hours to complete across a2x10Gbps bonded link (EDIT: I just realized that the admin interface is actually just 2x1Gbps). Some visibility into bottlenecks would be nice. Various speed reports are all over the map from what I have seen in this thread.(EDIT: Maybe I'm not the only one facepalming right now.)
- The VM came up without networking because my VM used "predictable network interface device naming" and I had a fixed IP set for an interface that had a different name after migration. A recovery boot and edit to /etc/network/interfaces solved it. Heads up for anyone encountering this.
- I'm pretty new to Proxmox so while I did see in the docs that I should remove open-vm-tools from my VM before moving it, I didn't immediately remember to install *and enable* qemu-guest-agent after import. Heads-up on this too.
Anyway, thank you! I have several dozen more VMs to move across and this wizard is very timely for me. That said, I'm also hoping the devs might comment on some of these pain points because if there are plans for improvements to thin disk migration in the near future, I'll just hold off for a bit to help test.
Here are my observations mixed with questions:
- My vmdk files on the ESXi hosts are thin provisioned disks. Even if I fstrim inside the guest and use vmkfstools -K to "Punch Holes" in the .vmdk file before running this import wizard, the importer seems to be copying and consuming the full provisioned space. This causes the import to take much longer. Could something be devised to skip the holes? Veeam Backup talks to VCenter and is able to only transfer the consumed size of thin-providioned volumes so maybe this could be an enhancement to the this import wizard?
- The resulting "disk" (on Ceph) did not have the discard option set. I double-checked on my next import (running now) and when preparing the import there did not seem to be an option to set that on the disk in the import UI. Would be a nice touch but not can always be set after import so not needed unless connected with my question above.
- My first import was slow. A 500GB thin disk VM took the importer 3.5 hours to complete across a
- The VM came up without networking because my VM used "predictable network interface device naming" and I had a fixed IP set for an interface that had a different name after migration. A recovery boot and edit to /etc/network/interfaces solved it. Heads up for anyone encountering this.
- I'm pretty new to Proxmox so while I did see in the docs that I should remove open-vm-tools from my VM before moving it, I didn't immediately remember to install *and enable* qemu-guest-agent after import. Heads-up on this too.
Anyway, thank you! I have several dozen more VMs to move across and this wizard is very timely for me. That said, I'm also hoping the devs might comment on some of these pain points because if there are plans for improvements to thin disk migration in the near future, I'll just hold off for a bit to help test.
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