How to Migrate a Guest Vm From Proxmox to Vmware

Mon, Oct 11, 2021

Migrating a guest VM from Proxmox to VMWare VSphere requires a few steps detailed below.

Export Image of KVM Guest to VMDK

Ge the Proxmox Guest Config
```
qm config 116
```

Get full path to disk

pvesm path 'main_vm:vm-116-disk-1,size=32G'

Convert disk image to VMDK:

qemu-img convert -f rbd -o vmdk rbd:main/vm-125-disk-0 proxmox-guest-image.vmdk

Create Virtual Machine in VSphere

Create a Linux Virtual Machine in VMWare VSphere

Copy and Convert VMDK to Thin Format

Copy over vmdk from Proxmox to VMWare. Copy into the Datastore / directory of your VSphere guest. The actual datastore should be symlinks in /vmfs/volumes/

Convert the image to the thin VMDK format

vmkfstools -i proxmox-guest-image.vmdk new-disk-0.vmdk -d thin

Add Disk as primary disk with scsi0:0 so it boots from it.

Add VMWare Modules into Initrd

In hindsight I should have done this before moving the VM.
The most important would be the VMWare Paravirtual SCSI driver.

Boot the VMWare Guest with the CentOS Rescue ISO. Select Trobuleshooting -> Rescue a CentOS Linux System. Choose 1 to continue when prompted. You will end up with your disks mounted in /mnt/sysimage

Mount the following filesystems into your image:

mount --bind /proc /mnt/sysimage/proc
mount --bind /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sysimage/sys
mount --bind /run /mnt/sysimage/run
systemctl start multipathd.service

Finally chroot into your system
```
chroot /mnt/sysimage
```
Edit the /etc/dracut.conf.d/drivers.conf and add the folloing VMWare Devices
```
# /etc/dracut.conf.d/drivers.conf
add_drivers+="vmw_balloon vmw_vmci vmwgfx vmxnet3 vmw_pvscsi"
```
I presume the essential piece would be the vmw_pvscsi.

Rebuild your kernel using dracut.

dracut --verbose --force 

# rebuild for a particluar kernel
dracut --verbose --force --kver 3.10.0-693.el7.x86_64

Launch VMWare Guest

Launch VMWare Guest without the CentOS ISO.