Hello all,
Here's what I'm looking to do, I'd like to know if others have done it, and if there's any place I can read up on the process. I have a CentOS 64bit server running in a remote datacenter where our connectivity is not great. I do not have the luxury of using a second server in the datacenter to do the conversion, nor can I afford the server to be down while I push data over the network. Same goes for Vcenter Server, I don't have connectivity to connect it to one of our internal vservers and I do not have the time to start the install of a vcenter server remotely while the server is down. So here's what I am attempting to do:
1. Use a linux Rescue Disk boot and dd image the server to the second harddrive
2. Format primary hard drive & install ESXi
3. Create a new VM and use rescue disk to import the disk image off the second harddisk.
voila
Now I can think of a few potencial road blocks with this plan, here's my questions:
1. What format should my second disk's file system be so that esxi can mount it without formatting it? (if possible)
2. After mounting the second disk should I copy the image over to the /vmfs/ appropriate folder so that I can toss it in as a disk or cd? (here's what my plan breaks down)
3. Does the disk tools allow me to convert a .img to a vmdk?
I understand this means I'm accepting some risks such as if the image file is corrupt I'm out of luck and without a server. But I do think that if this is possible it'll end up being faster over our 15k drives than if I tried doing this over the network. Let me know your thoughts & opinions...
thanks,
Mark
