New Proxmox Import Wizard for Migrating VMware ESXi VMs

hey everyone Brandon Lee from virtualization howto and today we're diving into something super exciting for the virtualization Community proxmox has recently released a new import wizard that makes migrating from VMware esxi VMS a breeze this has been something that I've been waiting for them to introduce for some time and that time is now and it couldn't be any better with the VMware broadcom shakeup in the industry in this video we're going to take a look at getting the new import wizard for VMware esxi installed in proxmox and how you go about migrating virtual machines from your VMware esxi server to your prox MOX environment so stick [Music] around proxmox has launched an import wizard aimed at simplifying the migration process from VMware esxi to proxmox this tool is not just for the home lab enthusiasts but it's also for those considering proxmox for their production environments now granted this is a new feature it's brand new and it certainly will evolve over time with new features and other nice to haves once the initial bugs are worked out getting started with the new Wizard is actually very straightforward you'll need to ensure that your prox MO server is updated to the latest version and you have the package PVE esxi import tools installed and that's also part of the process once you update your PVE host to the latest version and I'll walk you through this entire process from verifying your update repositories to rebooting your proxmox ve host so let's dive in so as you guys can see I'm logged into a newly installed proxmox ve host and take notice that the version is 8.1.3 the first thing that we need to do is I'm going to make sure that this proxmox host is pointed to the PVE no subscription repository you can also use the PVE test repository however I want to do the no subscription repository as that's typically where I run my home lab proxmox hosts anyway so I'm going to navigate to updates and then also this repositories submenu and as you can see right out of the box proxmox comes pointed to the PVE Enterprise update repositories you can see that from the PVE Enterprise here and then also for Seth we've got the Enterprise repository here so what I'm going to do from the guy the web guy is I'm simply just going to disable the Enterprise SE repository and disable the Enterprise proxmox updates repository then we're going to click the add button and dismiss the no subscription notification and then we're simply going to drop the drop- down box and choose the no subscription repository first we're going to click add and then we're going to click add another time and we're going to click the drop- down box and we're going to uh select the SEF no subscription we're repository you can either choose Quincy or Reef so I'm going to go with Reef I'm going to say no subscription here and I'm simply going to add those repositories so just to recap we've disabled the Enterprise repositories we've enabled the no subscription repositories and we get all the uh nice friendly nags about not having a subscription pointed to no subscription uh repository so now we want to back up to the updates node and we're simply going to click the refresh button and what this is going to do is now reach out to those newly configured repositories and see if we have updates that we need to apply and yes we do there are a ton of updates uh again this is a newly installed uh host and so lots of updates that we need to apply so I'm going to scroll up I'm going to just simply hit the upgrade button um we're going to of course need to uh verify the updates and just simply say yes I want to update okay so the update has finished so now I'm just simply going to exit out of here and then we are going to refresh the updates button and we're going to see if we have any more updates that we need to apply task completed okay and we have no additional updates that we need to apply so what I'm going to do now is simply reboot the proxmox host and this is so it will instantiate the new Linux kernel that it has installed and we'll make sure that all of the packages that were installed with updates are instantiated correctly so we're going to reboot the host now okay so our proxmox host has rebooted and one thing I want to show you guys that you can do I've got an SSH session that I connected to the proxmox server host and I'm simply going to paste in the command AP install PVE esxi import tools and conf confirm that with the Y and we're going to see if it's already installed which it should be so there we go we can see the the tool is already at the newest version so that tells us that the tool has been installed with the updates that we have applied to our host so once everything is set up adding the VMware esxi host storage to our proxmox host is the next step and then we'll move on to the actual migration process and take a to look at those steps however let's look at adding the esxi storage now on the next step okay so the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to add our esxi storage to the proxmox server host to do that we're going to navigate to Data Center and then we're going to go down to storage click the add button and as we can see here we now have the option for esxi so let's click esxi we're going to give it an identifier going to say ESX test and I'm going to type in the IP address username and the password and one other thing that you need to also do is check the skip certificate verification as most home labbers most likely have a self-signed certificate this box allows us to bypass that certificate error that we would get navigating to the host here I'm going to Simply click add and add our sxi server storage to our proxmox server now we can see that underneath storage we can see the ESX test storage now what's interesting if we navigate back over in our tree under poox test which is my uh test proxmox server we now have ESX test as a storage object so if I click on ESX test you're going to notice that it will automatically enumerate the data or on our esxi server and you can see all of the VMS that I have running on this server so as you can see I've got a whole slew of buntu Server LTS virtual machines running a buntu 2204 so I'm going to show you guys how you pivot over to the process of actually migrating a virtual machine over to proxmox now I want to call out something here one thing you have to do before you run this import on your VMware esxi virtual machine machine is you have to make sure that the virtual machine is powered off so I'm on the host client of the esxi host that I'm targeting for that storage enumeration and I'm simply just clicking on a bun to 10 just randomly picking one if you attempt to migrate a virtual machine that is powered on you're going to get a file is in use error or something similar in the proxmox server host side with the import wizard so I'm going to hop back over to proxmox I'm going to click the same virtual machine and you notice when you click the virtual machine the import button is made active so let's click the import button and we're going to take a look at the options that we get with the import so it's going to automatically assign the next available virtual machine ID you have at this opportunity a chance to change things like your CPU configuration memory configuration where the VM is going to be stored once it's migrated over um we've got the name of the VM and it just simply pulls all of this as the defaults that it sees on the VMware side now one call out here too if you notice the live import option you can check that and contrary to what you might think this is not saying that we can have a running virtual machine over on the VMware esxi side rather the live import is uh a bit interesting as an option it's intended to cut down the downtime that is involved with this migration process and importing the virtual machine so what proxmox will do is it will as soon as it has enough data to power on that virtual machine it will go ahead and do so and then continue to copy data into that virtual machine so keep that in mind it's not a live migration as you might think of a running virtual machine pull it over orchestrates the shutdown of that Source virtual machine I would love to see that in the next iterations of this tool however that is what the tool does at this point so if we navigate to the advanced tab one thing that we can take a look at is we can see the scuzzy controller we can see our discs our CD drives our network interfaces so one thing I'm going to do is change this over to vert IO scuzzy as my scy controller uh resulting config it basically gives us the configuration that it's going to set with this new virtual machine once it's imported over so at this point all we simply need to do is click the import button and once you do that the process of importing the virtual machine from the VMware esxi side over to proxmox is underway one thing I've noted is it's fairly Speedy at least in my home lab I've got 10 gig connectivity uh between my proxmox host as well as my VMware esxi host so as you can see we're nearing already 10% of these auntu virtual machines are just simply a clean install of auntu so not a lot of data a lot of white space on the disc it's clipping along so we will pick up when it is successful okay now the virtual machine has finished importing successfully so as we see we've got the successfully created disk and also task okay so we're going to close out of this dialogue box we can see we've got a bun 210 over in our proxmox data center that is so cool and all in an automated fashion with that new import wizard so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to uh navigate over to the console and then I'm going to start the virtual machine and hopefully if everything goes correctly we will see a boot of buntu server Okay so we've got a buntu starting up that is a good thing we've got files loading we got Services starting and would you look at that we've got a login prompt so log in and we successfully have migrated a virtual machine from our VMware esxi server over to our proxmox V host so as you can see the import wizard works great it's significantly stream lines the ability to move a virtual machine from VMware esxi over to proxmox now while it's a great tool there's always room for improvement here and I'm excited to really see how this tool evolves over the course of the next few releases thanks for watching if you found this guide helpful make sure to hit that like button subscribe for more content and ring the bell for updates please stay safe out there keep on home labbing and I will see you in the next video [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh

Channel: VirtualizationHowto

Views: 28,921

Keywords:

Id: H1t6hxCoiZw

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024