Preparing guest from ESXi 4.1 for importing to ESXi 6.0

[VictorST]

Hello folks! I am going to move several guest virtual machines from one host (ESXi 4.1) to completely different host (ESXi 6.0) via creating the OVF templates and then importing them. A lot of contradictive information regarding to this matter.What should I do (in steps) for preparing the guest VM to move it completely to ESXi 6.0 with different datastore?

What I understood.

1) Delete the guest VM network adapter (or adapters);

2) Delete the guest VM VMware Tools completely.

I am having also a limitation of 256 GB per virtual hard disk of the guest machine. What can I do to delete this limitation on a new (ESXi 6.0) host?

Thanks in advance for any advices!

[Dee006]

Victor,

We need consider few more checks before migration

• OVF OS Support Compactability Matrix
• Copy of ssl certificates
• Remove unused Devices from the VM.
• MF checks before importing the OVF

Any specific reason to remove vNIC and Tools from the VM?

Do you mean the Disk size or number disk per VM limitation?

[rcporto]

I think the steps about remove network adapters and VMware Tools is if you're exporting the virtual machine to be used in another platform other than vSphere... if the destination is vSphere you don't need these steps. And about the 256MB file limitation, I think is because your VMFS is using 1MB block size, that limits the size of the vmdk.

Have you shared storage between the two hosts ? Are your vSphere hosts licensed or free hypervisor ?

Anyway, here are three ways that can help you:

How to Copy VMs Directly Between ESXi Hosts Without Shared Storage | virtuallyGhetto

VMware KB: Moving or copying a virtual machine within a VMware environment

https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-move-a-vmware-vm-from-one-host-to-another-without-vmware-vmotion.h...