Moving a static VM between disparate environments

[JLogan3o13]

I have two environments currently, one at 5.1 and one at 5.3. The older environment housed all of our XP machines, while new Windows 7 and 8 machines are in the new. My plan is to remove any XP pools out of the old, then upgrade it. Once this is done I plan to use it for our test environment, as well as a place for static machines (Developer Workstations, etc.).

I have one machine, however, that is a Windows 7 static vm, in the old environment. It has been heavily customized since its creation, and I am loathe to rebuild it from scratch. Since there is no connectivity between the environments, is there a simple way to migrate, or copy, this vm from the old environment into the new?

[Alistar]

Hi,

if you have physical access to this environment I guess you can plug a USB 2.0 portable hard drive to your ESXi host, pass it through to a guest VM that has vCenter installed / has access to web client, and from there export it to .ovf template to the mapped hard drive. Then you would import the VM in the new environment again via USB passthrough.

Otherwise a direct connection between to ESXi hosts would have been the best to copy it from one host to another directly.

[MBrownWFP]

Very simple using a laptop or other portable storage.

Open vSphere Client and connect to the old environment, browse to datastore containing the VM and download all of the the associated VM files.

Connect laptop or portable storage to new environment, open vSphere Client and upload the VM files to appropriate datastore. Once uploaded, right-click the VMX file ("vmname.vmx") file and select Add to Inventory.

VM will now be available in the new environment.