As your post needs moving to the area for ESXi, I have reported it to the volunteer moderators.

Are the VMs stored on the ESXi 6 hosts' local storage, or on some shared storage to which you may be able to connect one of the ESXi 8 hosts too?

In case of local storage, you could -assuming sufficient bandwidth - try https://williamlam.com/2012/06/how-to-copy-vms-directly-between-esxi.html. I haven't tried this between v6 and v8, but it may be worth a try. It's basically the same as exporting/importing as an OVF, but will save time due to the direct copy.

Another option would be to restore the VMs from backup, which I assume you have.

André

I use ghettovcb to back up to shared/mounted NAS. i've tried to copy the VM using OVFTOOL but it won't boot. I've also tried to copy the VM from the back up location to the new ESXi 8.0 server, registered the VM - but it still won't boot. 

Obviously they're different models of server should that matter - IDK.

and yes, https://williamlam.com/2012/06/how-to-copy-vms-directly-between-esxi.html. is exactly what I tried. no bueno... 

... but it won't boot ...

 is not very helpful. Do you have some details, like error messages, warnings, a newly created vmware.log file, ...

André

Please don’t create multiple posts on the same topic, the duplicate post you have created today has been reported to the volunteer moderators.