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DragonWare
Contributor
Contributor

Moving from VmWare Server to EsXi

Hi all,

I have the following situation:

I'm running a Dell PowerEdge 2950 DUAL QUAD CPU Server with Windows 2008 Standard Edition and 4 virtual servers within using Vmware Server 2.x .

I have upgraded the memory of the server to 16 GB and to take the max out of the machine I think it would be best to switch to the free Esxi server?

I want these existing virtual machines to run under ESXI. I do not have a second server or SAN to put my images on, so the basic idea is to

shutdown all virtual machines, copy them over to an USB external HD + Backup all important stuff from main RAID storage,

Install EsXi, which probably formats or recreates all raid disk, in which i'm losing all data and then somehow tell ESXi to copy these images from USB disk

to RAID disk of server and start them in ESXI.

Is this possible to do it this way and what am i missing here, so the above won't work?

Hope to hear your oppions and help to migrate from this situation to VMWare ESXI.

Thank you.

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2 Replies
vmroyale
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome.

This sounds like a good plan. Here are a couple of links that may be of help:

Mounting USB Storage Device to ESX server

How can I migrate my Vmware Server VM’s to ESX? - Method 3

As long as you have the backup of the VMs, then worst case you could always roll back to 2008 and VMware Server.

Good Luck!

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
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tractng
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Dragaon...,

You will need to look for the "converter" utility. I went through similar path. The converter will allow you to browse the vm images and point to the destination server.

Install the converter on a workstation and you are good to go.

Tnt

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