@irrelevant said in Importing ESXi Datastore & VMs directly:
Hi.
I've got a (free license) ESXi box that I have a couple of dozen VMs on, mostly test stuff, but a handful that run services that are public (albeit non-commercial: It's a few low traffic websites, a Mastodon instance, and a couple of games servers.) I'm looking to switch, with the least fuss and learning curve, and so far xcp-ng seems to be a good candidate.
I've set xcp-ng up on a similar box, and have tested migrating some of the smaller VMs across using the import>from VMware option. This only works if the VM is stopped, and is very slow - in the order of 2-3 hours for a 64GB drive. I think this is because of my limited licence? For most stuff I can live with this - I'd just leave it going overnight - but I'd rather not have the public services down for this long, and it's likely to be even longer as the drives are significantly larger.
Is it possible, therefore, for me to move physical ESXi datastore drives across to the new box, and either use them directly, or access and import from them to the xcp-ng data drives?
Sorry to say yes it's a limitation of the free license. In order to live migrate its required to have at least a Standard Edition license of VMware vSphere ESXi. Any edition less than this will not be able to live migrate, only migrate with the VMs stopped.
The data store drives on the VMware host can't be moved physically as XCP-ng doesn't use VMFS it can translate but can't use them in the regular sense. Also the contents of the drive when installing XCP-ng are wiped, so they can't install XCP-ng to. On top of this XCP-ng is using the Linux filesystem called ext4.
So therefore unfortunately the public non-commercial sites would need to be migrated during a planned and announced ahead of time period of downtime!
There's also a free tool which will automate this process and does a really good job.
Also may I recommend a second host to pool together with the new destination?
Setting up a shared storage is required when pooling servers together.
Anyway if your running XCP-ng 8.2 you'll need to use Xen Orchestra, though it also houses a VMware to Vates migration tool otherwise known as V2V (https://docs.xcp-ng.org/installation/migrate-to-xcp-ng/).