Easy way to migrate ubuntu vm from esxi to proxmox

[epicurean]

Is there a easy way to migrate ubuntu vm from esxi to proxmox?
I followed the proxmox guide, and could never boot.
There are some guides suggesting converting the vmdk file to raw, and others to qcow. And then importing the harddisk to a precreated ubuntu VM in proxmox.

I used the ovftool for migrating windows vm from esxi to proxmox successfully. But somehow that does not seem to be the suggested method for ubuntu vms

Any suggestions for a quick and reliable method? esxi VMs are on ver 6.0 and proxmox on vers 7

much thanks

 

[Zedicus]

lots of options:
1: dd the disk from the one storage location to the other. if there is no connection you could always use a USB drive temporarily.
2: copy your /home over to a clean install on the new environment.
3: GPARTED or PartedMagic or clonezilla to clone one from one environment to the other. (same as 1 but with GUI).

you only want to covert if you absolutely HAVE to.

 

[epicurean]

lots of options:
1: dd the disk from the one storage location to the other. if there is no connection you could always use a USB drive temporarily.
2: copy your /home over to a clean install on the new environment.
3: GPARTED or PartedMagic or clonezilla to clone one from one environment to the other. (same as 1 but with GUI).

you only want to covert if you absolutely HAVE to.

Hi, thank you for your reply
1. when u say dd the disk, do you mean the entire vmdk disk in its unaltered form? I had the impression that converting it to raw strips away some of the hypervisor related "extras" that may impede the boot up inside proxmox.
2. Can you detail how this is done?

Much thanks

 

[Zedicus]

You do not want to move the disk from host to host. It is too much work to do that. Maybe i am not explaining well. Say you got a new ssd for a laptop and you wanted to upgrade the drive but keep the data. You would hook up the new ssd via usb temporarily and boot a linux distro from thumb drive. Then copy the internal drive on to the new ssd. Then physically swap drives and Viola, new ssd with same os in your laptop.

Honestly the most dificult part is getting the dd image onto a proxmox host somewhere usefull. If this makes since and you want to try i can link a guide.

 

[zer0sum]

It's usually trivial and you just do something like this:

• Export VM from ESXi as OVA
• Create VM in proxmox with the specs you want
• Detach and remove the disk from the new proxmox VM you just created
• Move the OVA onto proxmox and extract (tar -xzvf vm.ova)
• import the disk from the extracted OVA to the proxmox VM
  • qm importdisk 101 vm-disk1.vmdk local-lvm -format qcow2

101 needs to be the ID of your new proxmox VM
local-lvm needs to be your Proxmox storage name
vm-disk1.vmdk would be your exported vmware disk image