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Migrating from ESXi 4.x

A simple step-by-step migration guide from a ESXi VMware to a SmartOS KVM branded vm.

Disclaimer: the steps are developed based on advice from Orlando Vazquez on the mailing list and refined with some trial and error.

Getting stuff out of ESXi

This might be the most tricky part since the obvious choice, vCenter Converter is a surprisingly bad one. Instead the trick is to use a semi-secret tool: ovftool. It is a command line tool, sadly it does not work directly on SmartOS, for my tests I ran it on my laptop and it worked fine. The syntax is about the following:

ovftool vi://<your ESXi host>/<vm Name> <outfile>.vmx

examples

your host is vsphere.vmware.com and your VM is named wobble

ovftool vi://vsphere.vmware.com/wobble wobble.vmx

if wobble were in a pool named swimming

ovftool vi://vsphere.vmware.com/swimming/wobble wobble.vmx

Now this will take a while, so sit back and relax, upside is it will only copy the data really used be the VM. Once the program is through you will get somethig like:

# ls -l
wobble.vmx wobble-disk1.vmdk

And now for something completely different

Now comes the fun part, create the new VM. Look at How to create a Virtual Machine in SmartOS for details. Only addition here: you need to create a disk with the correct size for each .vmdk you want to import. You can double-check the size of the virtual disk with qemu-img:

qemu-img info -f vmdk <file>.vmdk

Once you run vmadm create, if you run zfs list you will see something like e0950735-dae5-481d-911a-80b14844759a as the UUID of your VM.

[root@SmartOs /zones]# zfs list
...
zones/e0950735-dae5-481d-911a-80b14844759a        1.49M  10.0G  1.46M  /
zones/e0950735-dae5-481d-911a-80b14844759a
zones/e0950735-dae5-481d-911a-80b14844759a-disk0  40.7G   185G  20.1G  -
...

So what we must do now is put our vmdk file into the zfs zvol, fortunately qemu-img comes to our help here, it allows writing our vmdk directly to the disk we created. (thanks to nahamu for suggesting that).

This does not work on all types of vmdk images!

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O host_device wobble-disk1.vmdk /dev/zvol/rdsk/zones/e0950735-dae5-481d-911a-80b14844759a-disk0

You can boot your VM now and should see your migrated data as if it were never somewhere else.

Final words

If you have more then one disk just repeat the steps for each disk. Also be aware that the image will use the full size and not sparse.