VMware - export VMs

Faolchu

strange question guys. a subsidery of our company is in teh process of closing down and they have all their servers on VMware. They want to send us over the VMs themselves on what i assume will be USB disk. then if needs be we can import them and recreate their domain on a new ESX box.

anyone any idea if this is at all possible?

uch

Yep, it's a piece of piss, you just copy VM files into your datastores, then open the container for each VM, right click the .vmx file and add to inventory, job done

Faolchu

but can ESX recognise an external USB drive for them to copy over or would i need to use something like winscp to copy from teh ESX host onto a USB drive attached to a windows PC? (i've bugger all linux experience)

basically I've to make a copy of a whole domains servers so that we can have them should there be a need in the future. its a seperate domain not attached to our domain.

I was reading about OVF files and it seems straight forwards using the vSphere client though it takes a while and teh server needs to be powered down to copy them.

swampgas

It's very possible, and easy enough.

What versions of ESX and vCenter are on the source & target systems?

Where are the VMs on the source system? Local storage/SAN/NFS?
Where will the VMs be stored on the target system? Local storage/SAN/NFS?

How many VMs are you talking about? Less than 10? Hundreds?

How much downtime can you tolerate while these servers are moved?

Faolchu

swampgas wrote: »

What versions of ESX and vCenter are on the source & target systems?

ESX 4.1 dont use vCentre

swampgas wrote: »

Where are the VMs on the source system? Local storage/SAN/NFS?
Where will the VMs be stored on the target system? Local storage/SAN/NFS?
both are local storage

How many VMs are you talking about? Less than 10? Hundreds?
[/QUOTE]
3 in total

swampgas wrote: »

How much downtime can you tolerate while these servers are moved?

two of them there will be no problem with down time as the office will cease using them over the next few weeks so they can be powered off and backed up during the production day, the final one is the DC & Exchange server so it in theory can be off line too long, say about 24 hours max over a weekend.

I'm thinking teh two i can take off line i cab create OVF templates of pretty easy, do one one night then the other the next night. its the DC/Exchange on that will be the awkward one because that's in use right up until teh doors are locked.

uch

How do you manage the ESX server ?

Faolchu

from the vsphere client on a networked windows desktop PC

uch

Faolchu wrote: »

from the vsphere client on a networked windows desktop PC

You should be able to use this to upload the VM files to the local storage on the ESX Host via USB, As regards the DC make sure that the correct vswitches or distributed switches are configured correctly to let it communicate on a different subnet (vLan)