How to migrate from Proxmox to VMWare?

Question

I am wondering how it is possible to migrate a full hardware VM in Proxmox (qemu) to a full hardware VM in VMWare (vmdk).

I have been searching all over the place, and it seems almost impossible to find anything at all.

The Linux kernel version from the Proxmox VM is Linux 2.6.32-19-pve.

Anyone got any ideas, or even better experience, with migrating from Proxmox -> VMWare?

Solution 1

Proxmox VE is using qemu for VMs, generally with qcow2 files to store the disk images. The images are usually stored inside a per VM folder inside the data-stores.

A Linux OS can usually run on any machine of a given CPU architecture, the pain is rather with commercial OSes that often don't work when you move a disk from a machine to another. So if that's a i386 or amd64 VM, just create a VM of the same architecture on VMWare, and attach a copy of the proxmox VM disk image to it.

I don't know if VMWare supports qcow2 images, but if doesn't, you can convert it using qemu-img to a format supported by VMWare:

qemu-img convert disk.qcow2 disk.vmdk

You can also do the conversion from within Proxmox (move disk and select vmdk as the format).

Solution 2

Since VMWare do not provide a v2v tool, I suppose you'll have to use one of the p2v tools available.

The obvious choice is vCentre converter but there might be other solutions from vendors like Acronis and Unitrends

EDIT:

When you move a disk image as is, you get the exact same data on the destination hypervisor, pretty much like taking a hard drive out of one PC and into another, with very different hardware. The p2v or v2v process actually injects the drivers and configuration that are required by the destination hypervisor into the guest, so that when it starts, you get correct drivers and settings.

Comments

[Adionditsak]

That is just disk migration pretty much, is it not?

[dyasny]

pls see the added edit