Archiving Decommissioned VMs as OVF/OVA

[BostonTechGuy]

I have a client that is shutting down a datacenter.  I have been able to turn off 50% of the VMs at that site.  These VMs are no longer being used, however the company has a retain everything policy.  Looking for a good solution to archive turned off VMs out of the vSphere environment.

I wanted to remove the VMs from vSphere using the least amount of space possible.  Exporting the VM out and/or using third party copy options gave me the same result - THICK DISKS.  Trying a different approach, I have started to convert the decommissioned VMs into OVF and OVA files. This appears to give me THIN Disks, no memory and no swap files.  Once I have the files as OVF/OVA, I am moving the files to our bulk slow storage.  After some amount of time (TBD), it will be transfer to long term offline storage.

Looking for other solutions and/or improvements to the one I have listed.

On a side note: I am surprised that VMware doesnt have a tool or option for Archiving VMs.  Veeam and CommVault have methods and a few tools.. thats about it. I would prefer not to get locked into a product to archive a decommissioned VM. 

Thanks,

Boston Tech Guy

[BostonTechGuy · Accepted solution]

This has been read enough that I am going to post my own solution.

For the client I decided to convert all the VMs that were being archived into single OVA files.  Once completed, the entire library of VMs were moved to large slow storage.  After about 90 days of downtime the files will be moved to tape archive and shelved.  This did save tremendous amount of space in all locations.  It also allows us the flexibility to redeploy the VMs if needed on any platform the client maybe using in the future.

Thanks,

Boston Tech Guy