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I need to move a vmware server 2.0 image to ESXi and need info on how to accomplish this task. The host is win 2008.

any help would be greatly appreciated

Zypher
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Brandon Grossutti
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2 Answers2

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I recently converted from a VMware Server environment to ESXi 4. For each VM, I ran the VMware Converter app and converted from VMware Server (the server 2.0 machine) to virtual (the ESXi machine). Worked great. The only wrinkle was that I had to reactivate each Windows machine. Apparently the "hardware" changed enough to trigger a new activation.

Chris_K
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  • the issue was that i didnt include all files, in previous moves of servers i only needed the vmx and the disk, i guess the convertor uses more, so i included all files and it worked just fine, thanks guys – Brandon Grossutti Jan 07 '10 at 18:04
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If for whatever reason you can't use the converter to move the machines there are a few ways to do this. First shutdown the guest and find it's data files on the VMware Server 2.0 machine.

You then need to copy those files to the ESXi server either through the Infrastructure Client (host->configuration->storage; right click the datastore and click browse) or through using SCP (eg WinSCP) and enabling SSH on the ESXi machine (http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/08/10/howto-esxi-and-ssh/).

Then import the machine by browsing to it's .vmx file in the datastore, right clicking and selecting add to inventory.

Hope these instructions work for VMware ESXi 4...

Antitribu
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    I am pretty sure the file format changed between Server 2.0 and ESXi4 and you need to use the converter. – pehrs Jan 06 '10 at 11:08
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    I've always been able to get away with it as most of the time they are quite good with backward compatibility and the vhd images rarely change. The converter is a much better idea but I've had a few scenarios where that hasn't been an option for a raft of reasons. – Antitribu Jan 06 '10 at 11:38