I decided to give it a try and migrate couple of my virtual machines from Windows 2003 + VMware Server to ESXi. Since it uses its own file system (vmfs3) I had to move all the VM’s to another server before installation. And that’s where my problems started.

Booting and installing the ESXi is quite simple, on IBM xSeries 3250 it detected all required hardware (LSI controller, Broadcom network adapters) and the system was ready within 10 minutes.

The only way how to manage ESXi is through VMware Infrastructure Client, GUI application that you need to install on your client machine – you can download it from the ESXi host.

I connected to the ESXi server and tried to transfer the original VM’s I moved out earlier, but there is no obvious way. You can create a new virtual machine or import virtual appliance, but nothing else.

After spending couple of hours googling and reading various forums I finally succeeded and here are some tips I found:

1. enable SSH access to the ESXi for the file transfer
On the host server press Alt-F1, type ‘unsupported’, then root password and you are in.
Then you modify inetd.conf file and remove the # on the line beginning with #ssh, restart the server and SSH should work.

Too bad it didn’t for me.

2. using the GUI open one of the datastores and upload the files from your local machine to the ESXi. However, you cannot add existing VMs, you have to create a new one – so make a new empty one and then replace it with the right one.

Well, didn’t work for me either, I was getting plenty of very ugly errors.

ESXi is a bitch when it comes to the virtual hard drives – it doesn’t like the (default) expanding ones, it doesn’t like IDE, it didn’t work for me with BusLogic SCSI adapter. The built in help is a joke and it doesn’t really help at all.

So after some more experiments and lot of cursing I found out that there is only one way how to do it properly:

Use VMware Converter!

The free version works fine, however there is an ugly trick – when installing you HAVE to install the Agent. Even when the installer says you should do that only if you plan to migrate the physical computer you are installing the converter on, it actually allows you to convert any kind of VMs.  If you install only the Manager, you are able to convert only remote physical computers. I tried three times on three different machines and it was always like that.

Just start the converter, choose Convert Machine and follow the wizard.

Source Type – Other (if you don’t see this one, you don’t have the Agent installed)
Virtual Machine – browse for the vmx file
Source Data – here you specify the virtual disks, you can even resize them
Destination – VMware Infrastructure Virtual Machine
Destination Login – ip address and login to the ESXi machine
VM Name – probably should be same as the source VM
Host – for ESXi there is always one (same as the IP above)
Datastore – place where to store the VM files
Networks – by default there is only one (VM Network), but you can create more
Customization – here you can check that when the VM is booted it will have VMware Tools updated automatically

And thats it. It takes couple of minutes but it works quite well.

Moving Virtual Server machines to Hyper-V Server is in my opinion much much easier.
1. start Hyper-V Manager
2. select ‘Import Virtual Machine’ and browse for the folder
3. wait until it is done.

Oh well, guess I’m too old and spoiled for this…