Resize and convert virtual hard disk from logically large VMWare Server guest vmdk to physically small VMWare ESX 3.0.1 vmdk ?

[primedia_jdavis]

The short-form question is: Does anyone have any recommendations on the most efficient path of converting a VMWare Server guest to VMWare ESX Server 3.0.1 if the original guest virtual hard disks were logically very large but growable?

Here's the long-form story, what I sent to my boss and co-workers very, very early this morning:

The migration to ESX failed due to additional virtual hard disk conversion issues.
I originally set up the VMWare Server guest, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 with two virtual hard disks each growable to 50GB (the logical partition size) but currently physically only using up 15GB and 20GB respectively. ESX wants everything preallocated (I guess for speed's sake, to eliminate double-fragmentation), and there's not enough hard drive space to handle that. So the conversion process entailed shrinking the logical 50GB ext3 partition down to 30GB, and the other one to 25GB, then transfer the partition to a new virtual hard disk, all in another temporary VM using a couple special Linux boot CD images (one with gparted and one with GhostForUnix). At the same time I also made the new virtual hard disks LSI-based rather than BusLogic based. That process took me until around midnight, but then the file transfer process to the ESX server using pscp.exe had an ETA of seven or eight hours (??).
I've been up most of the night waiting for these very long processes to complete only to have to cancel the transfer process halfway through upon realizing that they won't be done in time for me to fire them up before the users try to get online in the morning. The conversions failed anyway so I was wasting my time regardless; I tried firing up the converted disks to get the VMs back online on the old hardware, and it just failed. After the POST check it would just sit there with a blank, black screen with the cursor blinking in the top left corner. Fortunately I retained the original, growable virtual hard disks.

[GBromage]

Generally, converting a Windows box I do with VMWare Convertor - it can handle the disk resizing on the fly.

However, when doing a VCB restores and other-disk-type manipulations of Linux machines that are using LVM to manage the partitions, resizing disks or changing the geometry generally makes them die. As far as I know (and I'm happy to be corrected about this), this issue is specific to the Linux LVM subsystem, regardless of the type of file system on the partiton.

Depending on what you're running on the box, it might be better to create a new VM on the ESX host, copy the file system across the wire, then shut down the old server and rename (an re-IP) the new host.