vConverter - Converter to VMWare Player then to ESXi

[sdietz]

Hey Everyone,

I have an odd situation here. I have a client who just purchased a Dell Poweredge T410 server a few months back. The RAID on it went bad so we are going to converter it to a VM using vConverter. The only issue is we don't have a spare ESXi box to conver the image too. So my thinking was this..

     Run vConverter on the current system and save it as a VMWare Player 2.5 file to an external hard drive.

     Rebuild the Dell PowerEdge T410 with ESXi

     Move the VM onto the new ESXi

The part I am questioning is moving the image back onto the ESXi box. If I do convert it to a VMWare Player file, how easy is it to move that file onto the ESXi so it will power on?

Thanks!

[Troy_Clavell]

your plan will work just fine.

The part I am questioning is moving the image back onto the ESXi box. If  I do convert it to a VMWare Player file, how easy is it to move that  file onto the ESXi so it will power on?

Source will be "VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine", and your destination will be "VMware Infrastructure virtual machine"

[vmroyale]

Hello.

You could easily use Converter to move it to ESXi later, but the bigger issue here is that you are going to convert to an external drive and then wipe the original server.  I would feel better knowing that the P2V was a success, before I blew away the source and installed ESXi on it.

Good Luck!

[sdietz]

I agree, Im currently looking for an old spare server I have then can handle ESXi and make life easier.

Would I run the vConverter again and just convert the VMWare Player file to point the the ESXi box?

[Troy_Clavell]

Would I run the vConverter again and just convert the VMWare Player file to point the the ESXi box?

Yes, see my reply above

[continuum]

> how easy is it to move that file onto the ESXi so it will power on?

Very easy. Make sure Converter creates a split growing vmdk type.

Then you can use the vmx-file as is and can copy the split vmdk with winscp or Fastscp directly to the ESXi and import the vmdk with vmkfstools.

You do NOT need to run converter again.

This procedure is faster and more reliable then using converter a second time - maybe Converter is more double-click-along style ...

[sdietz]

Thanks everyone. I will be preforming the switch in a few days so I'll post back my results!