Example: Windows server 2016 VM from ESXI to Proxmox.
Ok, after many failures, this actually worked:
This is example for migrating Windows 2016 server VM from ESXi to freshly installed Proxmox without any VM:
1. Attach another storage to the Proxmox server (for. eg. external USB drive). Make sure that this storage is larger than VM size.
2. Create lvm-thin storage on that external USB drive and define that storage as "directory" storage and name it for eg. "external".
3. Open shell and download ovftool directly from my site because download from vmware will require authentication and therefore you cannot download ovftool directly. So command is:
wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36" https://www.heliasc.com/download/VMware-ovftool-4.4.0-15722219-lin.x86_64.bundle
4. Change ovftool permissions and run ofvtool installation (answer to any question with yes):
chmod +x VMware-ovftool-4.4.0-15722219-lin.x86_64.bundle
./VMware-ovftool-4.4.0-15722219-lin.x86_64.bundle
5. On ESXi, make sure that there is only one storage attached to VM and that there is no any ISO attached to VM
6. Run Ovf tool (xx.xx.xx.xx is your Esxi IP address, vm_name is name of your VM on Esxi). Ovf tool will ask you for root password of the Esxi. Operation will take a while (could be hours):
ovftool --overwrite --noSSLVerify vi://root@xx.xx.xx.xx/vm_name /mnt/pve/external
7. Create VM from OVF. You can change number 130 to any number you like. vm_name is name of your VM on Esxi and local-lvm is default VM storage location on Proxmox (you can change that to any other storage if you have one and make sure that this storage is larger than VM size). Operation will take a while (could be hours to finish):
qm importovf 130 /mnt/pve/external/vm_name/vm_name.ovf local-lvm
8. Configure bios:
qm set 130 --bios ovmf
9. Change SCSI interface to SATA because VM will not work without changing:
sed -i 's/scsi0:/sata0:/' /etc/pve/qemu-server/130.conf
10. Add network device to VM because ovftool will not add network automatically (I don't know why) and run VM. Login to win 2016, uninstall VmWare tools and install proxmox drivers and agent.
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/migration-from-vmware-esxi-to-proxmox.130079/#post-578316
Dieter Ronsse
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