Copying VMs between VMware Workstation and ESXi??

jimphreak

jimphreak

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 27, 2012
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Ok so I've been using VMware Workstation 10 for the past month and I've just finished building a dedicated ESXi 5.5 host server. I'd like to copy/move the VMs I've created in VMware Workstation 10 to my ESXi host. What's the easiest way to do this?
 
Nvmd I found the VM upload option in Workstation. Don't know how I missed it :D.
 
Or you just move the VM to whatever datastore you want to use in ESXi and then you browse that datastore from ESXi (vsphere client) and select "Add to Inventory" on the vmx file.
 
But how do you move it to the datastore? How can you access the VM over a non NFS share from the ESXi host?
 
You have to scp/etc. In general, the upload process works better though - especially since the disk formats have changed between them
 
1. use the upload option in wqorkstation
2. use VMware convertor
3. enable ssh service on esx box thru vsphere and use a client like filezilla to sftp the files directly to the esx datastore drive. Once uploaded, right click the .vmx file in vsphere datastore browser and click add to inventory. You ay get an error saying something about wrong disk type, etc. This is because disks format is slightly different between VMware products. You will need to run the disk convert utility "vmkfstools" to convert the disk to esxi type. read up on the command to view the disk options for the utility
 
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