Quick guide on how to migrate virtual machines from VMWare ESXi 7 to Proxmox 8.2. I’ve been using VMWare ESXi in my home lab and wanted to migrate this machine to Proxmox 8.2. The only mechanism available for this kind of migration was offline, as I did not have two physical machines to run both VMWare ESXi and Proxmox concurrently.
- Make a backup of the VMFS filesystem that contains your virtual machines
Its an extra hurdle to read your VMFS filesystem within Linux, so I opted to use SCP to copy to my Windows machine
Don’t skimp. Backup every file in this location - Make sure you have an idea of the hardware configurations of each virtual machine as this process will require you to manually configure the hardware
- After installing Proxmox, copy your backup to the Proxmox filesystem
In my case I used SCP to upload them from my Windows machine - Create a virtual machine for your target vm to migrate
Ensure you configure the hardware to the requirements
Do not add a hard disk, delete the SCSI disk created by the wizard
However – ensure you configure an EFI disk and disable Pre-Enrolled Keys (does anyone even use Secure Boot?) - Exclude net as a boot option from the Options tab, for the virtual machine, in the Proxmox web UI
This step seemed critial and undocumented. If I did not do this step, I was unable to boot the virtual machine - SSH to Proxmox, identify the VMID with
qm listand identify the location of your SCP - Migrate the disk image with
qm importdiskwith the syntaxqm importdisk VMID VMDK-FILE STORAGE-NAME
Example:qm importdisk 200 /nvme/vmware/kube-master/kube-master.vmdk nvme - Boot the virtual machine and open the console
- When you are dropped to the EFI shell, enter the command
exitwhich should take you to the BIOS - Follow the guide to add the path to your EFI boot file – https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/OVMF/UEFI_Boot_Entries
- Reset the virtual machine – and it should boot just the same as it did on VMWare
You may need to reconfigure the network and other hardware drivers and devices