Hopefully this question is not too cringe-worthy. I am a total newbie. About 9 years ago, I put together a free ESXi 5.5 host following a step-by-step tutorial, and installed an Asterisk phone system VM (PIAF) using a free downloaded image.
Last year, the VM was running out of disk space internally, so I tried to expand the HDD. First, I created a snapshot (thinking it was a backup option). It didn't seem to do anything, so I made a copy of the VM and edited the copy to add another disk.
In order to install a more recent Asterisk image, I needed to migrate to a larger HDD on the host, and upgrade ESXi. I moved the VM to a different disk; everything was working. I replaced the old HDD with a larger drive, then I upgraded ESXi 5.5 to 6.0, to 6.5, to 6.7 and finally to 7.0. The VM did not work.
What I did not realize:
- Apparently when I made the snapshot, the VM began running off of a "delta" vmdk snapshot file (?)
- And, the vmx in the new VM folder was referring both to the delta in the old folder and to the newly created disk vmdk in the new folder.
So I re-mounted the old drive again, and copied in the missing vmdk files referenced in the VMX. But it still won't run, because apparently ESXi 7.0 cannot use the "delta" vmdk snapshot format.
What is the best way forward? I really need the old VM to spin up so that I can access all the settings (weeks of work) to install a newer version of Asterisk. Is there any way to convert the delta snapshot image to a format ESXi 7.0 can read? Or to convert the snapshot back into a regular flat file?
I've attached output.txt (a list of files in my directory), as well as the vmx & vmdk files.
Thanks for any advice you can offer!
