Tuesday Tech Tip - Using OVF to Migrate Virtual Machines from ESXi to Proxmox

Every second Tuesday, we will be releasing a tech tip video that will give users information on various topics relating to our Storinator storage servers.

This week, Mitch is back in front of the camera to visit an old topic that he covered last year.

This follow up video will cover how to fully migrate a virtual machine from one hypervisor to another, plus cover what to do if you are looking to decommission your ESXi server and fully migrate all your data over to Proxmox. Join Mitch at the end of the video for a full walkthrough on these processes.

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[MarkRouleau]

Absolutely yes on the ISCSI mounting and migration.

[McGeeNZ]

Echoing the comments of everyone else, setting up my first Proxmox environment after the demise of ESXi and been looking for an easy way to migrate. Many thanks!

[Darkk]

Perfect timing! I am in the process of moving away from vmware to ProxMox. I have several ESXi hosts in a cluster that will be redone as ProxMox host.

[jSirBrickzAlot]

exactly what I've been looking for, thank you, now a subscriber. Also, we use Isci in our esxi cluster, we have 18 hosts. Definitely would appreciate a video on, all we have are iscsi datastores.

[johnmccourt]

Good video. I'm planning to move hardware this week and discovered that VMware have discontinued the free version ESXi. Proxmox is looking like a feasible alternative.

[brick]

Please do the full migration guide. Specifically the easiest way to do this all on a single machine (ie. I have one server that's ESXi and want to make it Proxmox instead)

[wallaceandrade]

This video helped me a lot!! Really thanks, man!

[Kronic]

It is criminal how few people have seen your great videos. Thank you for this guide. It is exactly what I was looking for.

[keithbaldwin]

Would definitely be interested in an iSCSI from VMware ESXi to Proxmox VE tutorial. This is good info. The other way I was doing it was downloading it from the ESXi web UI, then SCP the disks to the Proxmox storage before I performed the "qm importovf" step.

[andriansprasetyo]

do we need to unnistall the VMware tools first?
Thanks a lot.

[petersimmons]

Where was this when I tried converting a few months ago? :(

[DavidWiles]

A good tutorial. Showed me exactly what I wanted to do... One question though...Once you have migrated the VMs from ESXi to Proxmox and used "qm" to import the OVF, and if it was successful can you then delete or archive the original files/folder that OVFTool created?

[zzzz]

Error: Cannot parse locator:
i am getting this error, What could be the reason, please help

[frules]

Hello. When I do the to install, I get the text for the license agreement and then I get asked to proceed (yes or no). I type yes and then it just reverts to command line. No progress after that. What am I missing? I am doing this on the Proxmox shell. Thanks!

[kklip]

Hi, great tutorial first of all. However, I just tried migrating a Windows server VM using this method but it won't start in the proxmox host. I manually selected the correct OS in the options, attached the virtIO iso as a DVD, still nothing. One thing I notice in the VM hardware page is that I see the disk has a .raw extension at the end if that matter? Any pointers would be appreciated:) Thanks

[jamesstoffel]

Followed the steps to migrate a Win 2012, however on startup it goes into repair mode. I've gone through the comments, looking at possible solutions; none work. Has anybody has success moving a Win 2012 from Esx to Proxmox on first try? What, if any, settings were changed?

[spooterify]

Migrating from ESXi to Proxmox is really easy without using any tools. Simply copy over the image to /bar/lib/vz/images, convert to qcow2 and import to VM ID. Really simple.

[eugenesmirnov]

Fair enough. But some caviats are here.
1 if we use vSwitch on ESXi with vlans, this method isn't so helpful.
2 the old VMs seldom views SCSi disks as bootable, so (in my case) all ends up as IDE.
Really I don't see any value in installing any ovf-tools on PVE if it's possible to edit VM's conf file and (if it's needed) use qm disk import.

[bocci]

I was able to migrate an Ubuntu machine over. Didn't have any issues. The moment I did a windows 10 machine I get BSOD.