Migrating virtual machines

[jkkmclaughlin]

Hi Everyone, I've been trying to wrap my head around this and so far I've been unsuccessful.  I'm trying to migrate a bunch of machines off a free edition of ESX to our vSphere environment.  We don't have vMotion so we're not able to migrate the machines directly in vSphere so I've been trying alternate methods.  Here's what I've tried so far:

1)  Exporting to OVF or OVA file and they both fail.

2)  using vCenter Converter Standalone client to convert from ESX to vSphere and it fails at 1% saing FAILED: An error occurred during the conversion:
'The operation experienced a network error'.

Machines have been powered off during both instances.

I've also tried using a product called VEEAM to migrate our machines over but that failed as well and actually physically dropped our host mapping on our array and we lost one of our data stores.

Any assistance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[timlane]

You can always power off the VM, remove from inventory, then browse the datastore, right click the VMX file of the VM you want to move and register it on another host, that is, if they are connected on shared storage.

[continuum]

OVA is IMHO a bad idea - its very unreliable and it means that you have to convert each vmdk at least twice.

If there is a chance to get a network connection between the old ESXi and one of the new hosts you could use an approach that copies the files only once - read from old ESXi and directly write to the new one.
The only tool that you need to do that is a decent Linux LiveCD

[jkkmclaughlin]

Hi Timlane, the datastores aren't connected directly to eachother so I'd have to save the vmx file directly to another storage device then re-upload.  Would that work?  The vm is also thick provisioned to 300gb's.

[continuum]

Do you have network between location "old" and "new" ?

[jkkmclaughlin]

Yes, the old esx system (v5.0) is on the same network as the new vSphere (5.5) environment.