How to migrate HDDs from VHD to vmdk (VirtualIron to ESX)

[Ila_81]

Hello guys,

I am trying to migrate CentOS servers from VirtualIron to VMWare ESX.

I thought about getting a VHD out of the VI infrastructure (by exporting it with their command) and then converting it with VMWare converter to get a vmdk to attach to a virtual machine.

There are some problems though:

1) VMware converter 3.0.3 does not accept VHD or convert them straight away.

2) The linux partitions are using LVM and they can not be booted by either the player or VMWare workstation and WinImage seems to be able to open just the boot partition and not the other ones (they do not even show up in the combobox dropdown list)

Now: How do I move around? At least I need to be able to convert those VHDs into vmdk so that they can be attached to working CentOS boxes on the VMWare infrastructure and data copied across

But I am open to better solutions

Any idea?

Thanks a lot in advance

Ilario

[TomHowarth]

Firstly welcome to the forums.

The best way is to treat the VirtualIron guest as a physical machine and do a conversion by using the agent. this gets around the issues of unsupported virtual disk formats.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[Ila_81]

Hello Tom,

and thanks for your swift reply and the introduction to the forum :smileygrin:

I hope I will be contributing a lot soon enough

With regard to your reply, though, I thought that work just with windows boxes. If I am wrong, as I hope, how would I proceed when asked for the domain/username password?

Just normal root login details?!

Thanks again

Ilario

[TomHowarth]

my bad you are correct, I mis-read your original post, I thought it was a Centos Host not guest.

you could have a look at Platespin's PowerConvert or Vizoncore vConvert as both these support conversion of VHD to VMDK's

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator