Migrate VMWare image to ProxMox VE

Introduction

I came across this problem as I hosted a few websites (among this one) on VM with Debian 5 on a VMWare server on a Windows system.
This was not the ideal setup so I wanted to migrate to ProxMox.
Step one was migrating the VM to ProxMox as a KVM and later I shall migrate the data to a OpenVZ container, but that’s out of the scope of this article.

Goal

Migrate a VMWare .vmdk image to ProxMox VE (KVM)

Prerequisites

I assume you have root access to all servers and it’s handiest if you have fingerprinted the servers so you don’t have to log in everytime.

What do you need

  • A VMWare VM running on either VMWarePlayer, VMWare Workstation of VMWare Server.
  • A ProxMox server on a machine with a processor that supports VT

How to set this up

Copy the .vmdk file(s) to the new machine

If the VMWare image is hosted on a Windows machine, then it’s easiest to use FileZilla or WinSCP to SFTP/SCP the .vmdk file(s) to the server using your root credentials.
If the VMWare image is hosted on a Linux machine, then it’s easiest to use SSH to SCP the .vmdk file(s) to the server using your root credentials.

Create a KVM

Important is that you choose Type: KVM, Image Format: raw & Disk type: SCSI

Convert the .vmdk to .raw



Replace the .raw images



Start the KVM


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Author: masterdam79

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http://www.howdididothat.info/2011/05/11/migrate-vmware-image-to-proxmox-ve/