@john-c
Thanks, that pretty much confirms my thinking then. I'll keep practicing, and plan out how to best arrange things. I've got enough kit hanging about to set up another xcp-ng host, and have a dedicated storage box already talking NFS that I could set up some space on for shared storage, see how that performs. Once I'm happy it's working/will work I can work on scheduling some downtime for the public stuff..

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?