As the trials continue, so do the posts.

For this post I am relaying what I’ve discovered about trying to migrate a VM from VMware to Promox VE.

The original VM:

  • 4 vCore x 1 socket
  • 8 GB memory
  • 1 x 250 GiB VMDK
  • 1 x 1.1 TiB VMDK
  • Windows 2016 Standard

Granted, I have made things more difficult by having multiple network segments.  In my last post I think I mentioned setting up multiple VLANs, Bridges, and Interfaces in Proxmox.  This was because I’ve gone back and forth between two networks, and my Synology NAS straddles both.  I ended up adding the Synology NAS to as storage to the same Promox host twice, once per network, to hopefully make network access more efficient to the mass storage device.

Over the past week I have been working with the ovftool to migrate the file server to Promox, each time taking in excess of 24 hours and inevitable session timeouts, causing the import to stall and ultimately fail.  Since you cannot pick up where you left off (that would be a sweet feature to ask for) the process has been started multiple times.  This last attempt today, however, completed in just 8 hours successfully, so evidently my theory on network traffic efficiency won out.

The first step – use the VMware ovftool (installed to Proxmox VE server) to import the desired VM:

ovftool –overwrite vi://192.168.155.81/FileServ /pve-zfs

The second step – use qm to import the VM to Promox:

qm importovf 210 /pve-zfs/FileServ.ovf /pve-zfs

Once completed, the VM showed up in Proxmox as expected, as ID 210, but without a network interface (which is also expected).

First challenge – machine is not bootable.

Referencing Promox support documentation on importing VMs:  Migrate to Proxmox VE – Proxmox VE

Convert the SCSI disks to IDE or SATA.  

  • Detach disk
  • Change format to IDE or Sata
  • Connect 

Still no joy.  Disks were converted fine.  
I then added a CDROM to the VM and booted to a Windows Server 2016 install media ISO – confirmed that C:\ is the %systemroot%.  

I then went back to the hardware and made a few edits:

  1. Converted the Machine version to q35 from default i440fx
  2. Converted the SCSI Controller to PVSCSI
  3. Converted the Processors from kvm64 to host

Still no joy – machine does appear to boot it just can’t find a boot partition.

Maybe the OVF will give me some insights? Before getting that desperate, I tried one last thing – I switched the BIOS from SeaBIOS to OVMF (UEFI).

Bingo – the machine instantly booted successfully.

Lesson learned – don’t rely on the qm importovf to properly read the OVF and translate it to the same profile in Proxmox.  Make sure you have your hardware profile from VMware before