Offline P2V import into ESX

[Mors]

Hi folks, I wonder if someone could point me in the right direction or offer a little advice if possible?

I'm running ESX/Workstion/Fusion/Converter/VI in a test invironment on my Mac and it seems to work well, except I can't seem to fathom how I'd do an offline import into ESX. It works fine if I do one live into the ESX server over the network via convertor and then create a new VM via VI.

But, if I wanted to do an 'offsite' backup of a machine onto say a filedisk etc, then bring back onto site, or if I didn't have the option to back it up straight into the datastore - How would I get it on there?

Is converter my only option?

Hot clone's seem to go fine, but cold clones, or cold converts of VM's don't seem to like going into my ESX. I've not managed to get a cold convert to work yet. I go through the usual process of selecting to convert a backup/image and to import it direct into ESX, then I select the vmx etc, but it always fails after 1% of the convertion.

Any ideas appreciated.

Regards

[TomHowarth]

if you were in the Windows environment you would use something like WinSCP to copy the files to the ESX server or SAN LUN and then register the VMX file against a host. there must be a Mac specifice SSH client that can be used to mover the files to the ESX server.

Remember that SCP does not allow you to change the user to elevate rights, you would need to create a user on the hosts that had permission to logon remotely and the abiliity to write to the required VMFS partition.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator