Convert ESXI's VMDK file to VHD

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Re: Unable to import vmdk Error: not a VMDK file

Hello,
I was planning to change virtualisation platfroms from VMWare ESXi to XCP-NG and since I'm new to XEN and everything related to XCP-NG I don't really know how to migrate my virtual disks from VMDK to VHD. As I understand OVF format usually takes care of all the necessary conversions.

All the virtual machines have been exported to OVF but since I have very big virtual disks (1TB+) I feel it would be very taxing on my home network to download those images via a web browser. Also, my esxi crashes when under heavy network load, which is why I decided to switch to XCP-NG.

I've seen a similar problem in another post, so I just need to know whether it's possible to convert disks or, at the very least, mount them to a VM so I can move files from the VMDK disk to a VHD.

I'm going to add some pointers just in case people don't know what the difference between -flat.vmdk and .vmdk files are on ESXi machines.

DISKNAME.vmdk is a file descriptor that contains all of the vital information such as, size, encoding, unique identifier, and so on, about your base image which in the case of VMWare is -flat.vmdk
DISKNAME-flat.vmdk is a file that contains all of the data you store on your virtual disks but your VM won't run if you have a missing descriptor file, hence the issue a previous poster had encountered when trying to convert his disk image.

Thanks in advance!

olivierlambert

Hi,

Why not using Xen Orchestra to do all the steps for you?

https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/10/19/migrate-from-vmware-to-xcp-ng/

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@olivierlambert Sorry for my lately response but this is not an option for me (I had researched the V2V solution, it's good but it requires at least 2 pieces of hardware to complete the transition). I have only 1 server working as a level 1 hypervisor and one simple HP to manage my backups. I was able to extract all of the VMDK images from my ESXI and was successfully able to setup my XCP-NG with Xen Orchestra.

However, since I'm new to this community and especially Xen architecture I've been having some issues regarding the storage of my virtual disks. To my understanding if I were to upload (import) any VMDK image it would automatically convert that disk to .VHD (which is also good and simplifies a lot the process).

Storage Respository (SR) is a very new concept to me, I was able to mount EXT disk to see how XOA processes each imported file but I find it a bit complicated to do the same thing without XO, cause files I'm interested in uploading are bigger than 1TB and attempting to upload those big files through a browser would just bring even more hurdles along the way.

Could you please point me in the right direction so I could start attempting to upload bigger files.

P.S. My secondary machine that manages backups also serves as an ISO SR and is connected to my XCP NG via SMB/CIFS. I also mounted another drive (with some virtual disks already preloaded )to XCP NG using NFS but the XOA/XCPNG-Center do not see them when I move those files to a created folder (guess its due to missing UUID not making those files visible to those clients)

Thank you very much!!!

olivierlambert

If you want to put VHD file in an existing NFS SR, you need to indeed have an UUID type. Note that the SR file structure should NOT have any subfolder into it.

To generate an UUID, you can use uuidgen command.