Deamions Lab - VMware to Proxmox Migration

Well this has been an interesting venture. Setting up the Proxmox server was a bit of a learning curve. Here are some of the things i had to tweak.

Hard Drives – I was not sure what option I wanted to go with and the raid is not very clear. I opted for just an old fashion RAID10 with 4 512 SSD’s. This in the end gave me 1TB is usable storage. I also created a ZFS pool with them and then created 2 ZFS paths. One for ISOs and one for VM-Drives.

I then created a 2nd ZFS pool with my 4tb drive. Made a path for Backups on this.

Example output:

PVE Host Disks/ZFS

Datacenter Storage

Next I needed to stage my networking.. This was a headache because it takes a little trial and error.

I had 4 physical NICs 3 for a VM network and 1 for some game servers.

One of my 3 VM NICs was being used for the management network for the Proxmox server so that left 2 available. I turned the 2 free ones into a Bond1 with one active and on standby. After that I added the bond1 to a vmbr1 so I could apply it to the VMs.

I then needed to create the game servers network. This required 2 VLANs on a single NIC. I was able to created the vlansXXX then add them to their own vmbrXXX

Example output:

This could be entirely incorrect but it worked for my purposes.

Now that that was finished and tested. I could start moving VMs from ESXi to Proxmox. This was simple since in the later releases of Proxmox they included a import from ESXi. All i had to do was add the ESXi storage to the Datacenter and provide the creds. This mounted it and allowed me to click it and select what VM i wanted to move. One key note… It seems like the VM has to be powered off during this migration to prevent any additional writes on the vmdk. VMware tools also needs to be removed prior to the migration.