I searched and I searched and I searched. I found lots of info, but not the answer I need. I'm sure if I spent the next two days searching, I'd eventually find it. So I ask your pardon in advance if you've seen and answered this a million times before.
MOTIVE:
I had an ESXI server with a datastore comprised of 2 RAID 5s consisting of a total of 6x3TB drives giving me about 10TB of space. Well, it was full. So I decided to backup all the VMs and VMDKs (in multiple ways, wait, it's coming) and recreate one RAID5 disk using all the drives and recover 3TB of storage.Done. Seemed/s smart, I didn't have to buy new 4 or 5TB drives to replace them all and saved myself at least $1,000.Yeah me.
BACKUP IMPLEMENTATION:
I have five VMs running all the time, four servers, and one admin station. On the main file server I removed non-essential drives/VMDKs and started copying them down to a spare NAS for temporary storage. I used the VSphere Client, browsed the datastore, picked the VMDK files and saved them off. All cool with me based on past experience as I've been through this before to edit the VMDK text file to rename the files in the past. (Yeah, I know. Easier to SSH in and do it from the command line.) Dealing with so much data, backup and restore is literally taken weeks (only about 14MB/s transfer rates at BEST, and 7-8 MB/s norm.) My actual VMs and essential data I backed up with VEEAM.After everything was backed up, I recreated the new RAID and got my extra free storage. (Yeah team!)
RESTORE IMPLEMENTATION:
I used VEEAM to restore all my VMs. It worked perfect. It's a great program. (The main file server with 3.5TB of essential data took 90+ hours to restore!) All VMs are up and running fine with my essential data. Now we start running into the problem. I used VSphere Client to browse the datastore, made a new folder called DRIVES, and have started to upload some of my previously removed VMDKs stored on my NAS. I went to add some of the uploaded drives back into my file server VM and, SURPRISE! ESXi doesn't see them. They show when browsing the datastore, but they don't have the option to add to inventory and aren't found when that database is rescanned. FAILURE! Trying to figure things out I looked at the VMDK text files and to find the difference. I hoped it was just a database signature/ID that needed to be updated to the current datastore and all would be edited and fixed fast. No dice. Comparing the information, I could see the differences but had no clue what they should be. So I created a new drive in an existing VM with the same size and parameters and looked at it, all different information in each file and I don't see a logical fix to the problem that way.
Yes, I know now that I should have used a SCP program to copy the files. In my experience, what I did would work but obviously my experience was limited in scope and it didn't work for this situation. I read the articles similar to my situation to use the Standalone Converter, but that doesn't work as it's looking for a VM (and thus a VMX file) to convert a machine instead of just a drive.
So I throw out my problem to the more experienced masses than I. How can I go about re-using my "old" downloaded VMDK drive files in my new datastore?
INFO:
ESXi 6.0U1
old drives h/w version 4
new drives h/w version 11
3.5TB down and 6.5 TB to go, about 8 drives.
Bill
