ESXI 6.7 Host HDD to SSD Procedure

[Nmh]

Hi,

Sorry I am pretty new to ESXi and would like a bit of advice, I currently have a 750GB HDD running the ESXI host and one VM, there is also a 6TB HDD attached with further VM’s running and storage drives.  My goal is to upgrade the 750GB HDD to a 1TB SSD and keep all my settings and VMs as they were. My initial thought was to shut everything down and clone the drive to the new but upon reading posts and articles this is a big no no and not recommended.

Would the plan be to perform the following?

Shut down all VMs, export all VMs(including ones running on 6TB HDD) to a temporary drive as OVF

Export ESXI settings to temporary drive by following: https://graspingtech.com/backup-vmware-esxi-6-5-configuration/

Shut down hardware and replace 750GB drive with 1TB SSD

Power on and install ESXi 6.7

Import exported ESXI settings from temporary drive

Import VMs back from temporary drive from the OVF files

Would this be a good plan to follow or am I missing anything or going the wrong route?

Would I need to back up the VMs running on the 6TB HDD which is staying connected or will these be picked up once the host settings are restored?

Thank you for your help

[ChrisFD2]

Hi @Nmh

Is this a single ESXi host with no vCenter server?

I would highly suggest that you buy a 8GB or so USB drive to run ESXi from rather than installing it on a datastore. They are inexpensive and will make working with Datastore's much easier.

What settings on the host are you trying to preserve? Anything you can achieve with 5 minutes of work? Personally I would do the following (if no vCenter server):

Shut down all VMs.

Copy them to the 6TB HDD (if enough room).

Build ESXi on a USB stick.

Add 6TB and SSD to the server and as configure each as a datastore.

Move the VMs about to whichever datastore you want them on.

Import the vmx file and select I copied them.

Then clean up. The above may be wrong as it's late, I'm tired and I'm just in from a friendly football match!

[Nmh]

Hi,

Thank you you for the reply

Yes is is stand alone and no vcenter

Running from usb stick would that impact performance and also be more likely to fail or become corrupt?

A standard file copy would be OK? No need to export/import?

Thanks again

hope the match went well

[ChrisFD2]

Normal USB is fine, ESXi loads into RAM on boot up and doesn't write to the USB stick if you configure syslog to a datastore:

VMware Knowledge Base

I have to be honest it has been some time since I played with a single ESXi host, so perhaps export/import would be a better option.

[Nmh]

Cool cheers, I will look into the USB option

[Viperman]

Depending on the type of server you could use USB or what I have been doing is dual SD cards in my VMWare hosts.  I haven't installed ESXi on a hard drive in years.  you do have the scratch/log issue which can be resolved with syslog as mentioned previously.

[Nmh]

Thank you, when going the USB route I take it all config is saved to the USB device?

From reading it does look like a lot of users run from USB, will performance not be affected?

[ChrisFD2]

Performance is not affected as the Hypervisor loads into RAM when it boots.

As I've posted above you should configure the logs to go onto a datastore. After you install to USB and log in it will give you a warning to state that logs are not on persistent storage.

[Nmh]

Awesome, guess the next stage is to install onto USB and have a play

thanks again