What is the best way to restore VMs after a server refresh

[barcode2328]

Hello all,

First time poster here. A group of people at my job have their own VMWare environment that they setup a while back. It has 3 VMs up and running on it and they want to bring up a fourth one. Unfortunately the new machine they want to bring up is going to be almost 1TB in size, and they initially setup the VMFS datastore to 1MB, meaning that a machine can only be as big as 256GB.

From researching, it looks like there is absolutely no way to get around this except to redo the datastore. Is this correct? If it is, I was looking at a way to save the three current machines and reload them after it is refreshed. One way that I thought of was to go browse the datastore and copy all of the files over to my local machine for the VM (.nvram, .vmdk, .vmx etx...all files), wipeout and redo the ESXi host with the correct datastore setting, build the VM machines in vSphere and then replace the files with the copied ones. Will this work fine? I didn't see much information out there on this and I want to make sure I don't mess up the VMs. This environment consists of 1 ESXi host with all local storage (2TB).

Also, if anyone knows of a better way to accomplish this, please feel free to give your input. I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

[JCMorrissey]

Hi,

What operating system is the new virtual machine? if it is windows you could get around this particular problem by adding 4 x 250gb individual disks to the vm - in the vm then under computer management create a dynamic disk and concatenate the disks together and it will create a single 1tb drive. Have done it and it works around this particular problem.

Many tx

[Sreejesh_D · Accepted solution]

Hi,

welcome to communities!!

From researching, it looks like there is absolutely no way to get around this except to redo the datastore. Is this correct?

yes, unfortunately there is no way to change the blocksize of vmfs datastore without reformatting.

If it is, I was looking at a way to save the three current machines and reload them after it is refreshed. One way that I thought of was to go browse the datastore and copy all of the files over to my local machine for the VM (.nvram, .vmdk, .vmx etx...all files), wipeout and redo the ESXi host with the correct datastore setting, build the VM machines in vSphere and then replace the files with the copied ones. Will this work fine? I

yes, it will work. You just copy all the folders in this VMFS datastore to a safe location and upload it back once the block size increased. Once upload compleated, go to VM folder, right click the VM and Register the VMX.

you can find the steps to change the VMFS block size in this KB. VMware KB: Block size limitations of a VMFS datastore

[barcode2328]

Unfortunately it is going to be Linux . It is interesting that you mentioned that workaround though because initially it was going to be a Windows machine and I loaded up 4-250GB drives for them, but it didn't cross my mind to concatenate them together to make one drive. I learned something new today . Right after I had the machine up though, they changed their mind and decided they needed a Linux machine. I appreciate the reply. Thanks

[barcode2328]

Thanks for the reply, this is exactly what I was looking for. I wasn't aware of the fact that I needed to register the VMX file, so thanks for bringing that up also.