Convert Machines from Fusion to Vsphere

[MontanaSky]

I have about 10 vms running on Fusion 2.x on the mac. Most of these VM's are running debian. What is the easiest way to get these vms moved to my Vsphere setup? Thanks in advance.

[admin]

I'm not sure if this is the easiest way, but I know it works because I've done it a few times recently. Since you're asking about vSphere, I assume you're comfortable with the command line.

The full .dmg of the Fusion 3.1 beta comes with ovftool (not installed by default, you have to do a custom install). ovftool isn't integrated in the UI at all (one of the reasons it's not installed by default), but you can use it from the command line (it's installed to /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/ovftool/ovftool) to convert a .vmwarevm to an .ovf. Then use vSphere Client to upload the resulting .ovf.

[PaulSvirin]

Here are some ideas about the conversion:

---

iSCSI SAN software

http://www.starwindsoftware.com

[AnatolyVilchins]

What keeps you from

1)Convert VMs with VMware Converter

2) Add VMs to vSphere

?

iSCSI Software Support Department

[rcardona2k · Accepted solution]

If you're handy on the command line and have direct connectivity between your Mac and a vSphere host, you can use /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-vdiskmanager to transfer your Fusion VMDK's directly to an ESX host. Here's the relevant usage from vmware-vdiskmanager:

ex 6: vmware-vdiskmanager -r sourceDisk.vmdk -t 4 -h esx-name.mycompany.com \

-u username -f passwordfile "[storage1]/path/to/targetDisk.vmdk"

On your Mac sourceDisk.vmdk is the one in /Users/you/Documents/Virtual Machines/VMbundle.vmwarevm/YourVMDisk.vmdk, or in the case of a snapshot, the leaf disk name appended with an -00000x.vmdk name.

Once the VMDK is on the ESX host you can create a new VM referencing the VMDK file. You could also scp your .vmx file to the ESX host, but I prefer to create a new VM to build a machine off of vSphere default VM settings.

[Edificom]

We had exactly this issue with a client, and because of firewall polices we coulldn't easily use the VMware Converter tool, so we used the approach above of using the vDiskManager. We have a blog post detailing the process if that helps.

Good luck

[MontanaSky]

Thanks Everyone for all the ideas.

using the vmware-vdiskmanager command worked best for what I needed to do.

Cheers!

Joseph

[MontanaSky]

Hello Etung,

Would you mind posting an example command line that would convert a local fusion machine to a ovf file either on the local machine or directly to the esx server?

Thanks!

Joseph

[admin]

Would you mind posting an example command line that would convert a local fusion machine to a ovf file either on the local machine or directly to the esx server?

First change to the ovftool directory - it doesn't seem to handle spaces in the path well.

etung$ cd /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/ovftool/

Converting a Fusion virtual machine to an .ovf:

etung$ ./ovftool /Volumes/VMs/FreeDOS.vmwarevm/FreeDOS.vmx /Volumes/VMs/Upload/freedos.ovf

Then use VIClient to upload the .ovf (File > Deploy OVF Template...). I've done this before.

Uploading directly:

etung$ ./ovftool --noImageFiles /Volumes/VMs/FreeDOS.vmwarevm/FreeDOS.vmx vi://$USER@$HOSTNAME

Of course, replace $USER and $HOSTNAME as appropriate. I'm not quite sure this works - it's looking like it should work but fails for me. On the other hand, I'm using random internal builds so it could be because of that.

[MontanaSky]

Awesome, tks Etung, I will try this on one of my machines left to migrate and post my results.

Cheers!

Joseph

[admin]

Useful command,

thanks

Matteo