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jhjkempen
Contributor
Contributor

run a esxi vmware machine temporarily on Workstation

i have esxi free running and sometimes this server is so busy that certain vmwares on it can't be run usefully because of the low memory / cpu.

On the esxi most vmdk are stored on the HDD and some come from our NAS.

My question is if it's possible to temporarily run a Virtual machine stored on the ESxi, but with the resources from where VMWare Workstation is running (my workstation with intel i7 and 24gb of free RAM). So the Esxi only is used for datastorage instead of running the whole vmware.

And this needs to be done without converting the vmdk etc etc.

is this possible? Best would be that using vsphere client the Vmware is shutdown on the esxi. Workstation is started up and i can point to the internal datastorage of the esxi server and run the vmdk from it.

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

This is not possible -

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jhjkempen
Contributor
Contributor

i also have lot's of vmwares for my Esxi Server stored on my Qnap NAS and can be accessed using Explorer on Windows 7.

I can easily start this Vmware again using Workstation... so it is possible?

But not for vmdk stored on Esxi, because of a missing SMB server on Esxi......?

EDIT noticed this is not a workable solution.  Going to copy the vmdk that i temporarily need using Veeam FastSCP and than use it with Workstation.

EDIT2 it seems that a copied vmx + vmdk can't be imported in Vmware Workstation....???

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

Occasionally I run VMs stored on a remote VMFS-filesystem in Workstation using Workstation on Linux-hosts - the procedure is not trivial or selfexplaining and makes only sense in rare cases.
Download the full directory instead - then just doubleclick the vmx-file to run it on a Windows-host.

Watch out - the flat.vmdks are almost the same but ESXi uses a different snapshot-format - if you are careful you can run the VM with mixed snapshot chains - using esxi-snaps together with WS-snaps


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

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