transfer ESXi installation from USB key to hard drives

[huwy]

hi there,

We have an ESXi server running in a branch office used for Veeam backups.

ESXi installed on a USB key plugged into the front of the server.

The plan is to transfer the ESXi installation so its run from the hard drives.

We were going to just wipe and reload but it occurs to us that Veeam will see the server as a new server and we will have to send over our replicas from scratch.

Therefore we were thinking that it would be a better idea to transfer an "image" of the ESXi installation from the USB key to the hard drives.

Does anyone have any advice on how best to do this?

Cheers,

Al

[Litejk]

I'm not an expert in this, but I guess you can put the USB stick in a linux server and use dd to copy it to a harddrive. But unless you resize the target disk, you will loose the rest of the space on that disk. For example if your USB stick is 4 GB, your destination harddrive will also use only 4 disk and the rest of the space is lost. You could however, if you are running with harwdware RAID on the server, just create 2 seperate virtual drives with different sizes - 1 around 4 GB (a little bit bigger just to be safe) + 1 for the rest of the space.

[continuum]

I see no point in doing so but you should be able to get a working copy on harddisk with a Linux LiveCD.

Then you would run something like

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=notrunc,noerror

replace sda and sdb  with the actual devices

[ItsMeHere]

Yet another idea could be to ask Veeam for their suggestions on the topic...

I haven't tested that myself, but:

Did you try to save the existing configuration information using vi/esxcfg-cfgbackup, reinstall ESXi on the disks, then reload the saved configuration information to the new installation?

It all depends on which parameters Veeam takes into account when determining a "new" installation.