VMware to XCP-ng Migrate Only Specific Disks

planedrop

It's been a minute since I migrated anything from ESXi to XCP-ng, but I'm going to be doing this in a production setup again fairly soon.

This one has been rather challenging since the VM in ESXi is 16TB, but we only need to migrate the C drive which is 100GB.

Is the best route to do this just to export the VMDK and import that into XCP-ng? Wasn't sure if the newer migration tools had options to select which disks to import and things like that.

Pilow

@planedrop why dont you just disconnect the VMDK at source VM ?

planedrop

@Pilow Yeah this is also an option, and then just export it and copy it over to XCP-ng. I was just wondering if there was a more proper way to go about this that Vates recommended.

olivierlambert

Ping @florent

MajorP93

@planedrop Pretty sure the official and recommended way is to use the V2V (VMWare to Vates) tool that is baked into Xen Orchestra.

I used that tool back when I migrated from our old VMWare Cluster to the new XCP-ng environment. It worked without any issues.

Best approach IMO would be to disconnect the unneeded virtual disks on the source VM on VMWare side and then use V2V tool to migrate over the VM.
I did it this way for a VM with disk bigger than 2TB aswell. After migrating the VM I created an LVM volume on the XCP-ng VM with the required size and rsync-ed the remaining data from VMDK > 2TB to target XCP-ng LVM volume.

Documentation: https://docs.xen-orchestra.com/v2v-migration-guide

planedrop

@MajorP93 This was also my thought, the disconnection method you mentioned, I was just wanting some feedback about that.

I do have to be a bit careful because the migration must happen and then the VM on VMware must go back online while I work with the vendor to migrate all the rest of the data.

As for the bigger than 2TB issue, that won't be an issue for me. This VM is HUGE but it's because it's thick provisioned and no longer needs to be, the new VM will have like 8 disks but none of them will be over 2TB (most will be less than 100GB).

So I am thinking using V2V and just powering off the VM on VMware, disconnect the unneeded VDIs, then migrate, then reconnect those VDIs and power the VM back on.