How to migrate a vm from Workstation to ESX while retaining snapshots?

[Brad_Borgald]

I'm trying to migrate one of my hosts from Workstation 6 to ESX3i. VMWare converter seems to do a good job, but it doesn't convert the associated snapshots.

Is there any way to convert a VM and retain the snapshot history?

[depping]

As far as I know this isn't possible and I wouldn't recommend it if it was! snapshots can grow fast.

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

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[nick_couchman]

When I migrated my server VMs, the snapshots did not come along with it. If this is possible, it's probably only possible in the paid converter license. I can understand wanting to do this, but, as Duncan says, these snapshots can get out of hand very quickly, and migrating the snapshots along with the VM would probably push the migration time out significantly.

[Brad_Borgald]

I'm not particuarly concerned about disk space or time to convert the VM, the snapshots are the value that I'm trying to retain in those VM's. ESX definately has a performance advantage over Workstation, but it's too bad that I cannot just copy over the raw vm and have it just work (including old snapshots). I'll have to leave this host on Workstation I guess.

[jrc92]

I have the same question. We are doing a massive upgrade from Workstation to ESXi and really need to retain the snapshots. Otherwise, we're going to have to clone out each snapshot and convert it individually. This will be a big waste of space.

I ran the latest converter (3.0.3) and found that I lost all of the snapshots.

Is there any way to do this? Is there another product besides the free converter which can do this?

Thanks,

John

[RParker]

> I'm trying to migrate one of my hosts from Workstation 6 to ESX3i.

You can't do it. The paid version of VM Converter isn't any different than the "free" version. The only difference between VM Converter standard and the Enterprise (license) copy is simultaneous conversions and you can remotely converter from a Physical to VM Ware Stand alone or ESX server, otherwise you have to install VM Converter on the box you want to convert.

That's the only difference between the 2.

you have to commit the snapshot of the VM you want, and convert THAT to ESX. If you want the snapshot versions, you have to change the snapshot, make a backup of it, and save it as an archive. You can't retain snapshots from VM Ware server / Workstation and convert those to ESX.

[RParker]

> Is there any way to do this? Is there another product besides the free converter which can do this?

Nope, no other product can do this either. They only convert the CURRENT state of the VM, not the snapshots. So you have to pretty much do it the way you were saying, save each state is a different VM. Of course if you simply take a backup of each one, that isn't as much space.