Esxi on Matt Thornton

Migrate VMWare Fusion virtual machines to VMWare ESXi

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 12:21:23 +0000

Way back in 2012, I dabbled with ESXi. In fact, I faced then, moreorless the same problem I was facing a few days ago.

That particular ESXi server didn’t last particularly long - no technical issues, it just didn’t turn out to be the thing I wanted.

Fast forward 6 years, and I found myself in a new situation where having an ESXi host would be useful. We use Azure a lot nowadays, but there are still some scenarios where we’d like some on-premise kit such as developing against Sharepoint. (Although in fairness, I’m not sure anyone really ever *wants* to do that.) I digress.

Some notes on VMWare Converter

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 10:50:24 +0000

VMWare converter is a free tool from VMWare to convert Virtual Machines from one format to another. I’ve recently built an ESXi server and was looking to move some machines from VMWare Fusion 5 over to it. There are a few pitfalls to be aware of:

VMWare Converter 5.0 is not compatible with ESXi 5.1 (yet). Don’t even try - Converter will just hang.
Converter 4.3 is allegedly compatible with 5.1, but I didn’t have any success. I would get “invalid fault” exceptions.
Convert 5.0 with ESXi 5.0U1 is painfully slow to transfer machines, even on gigabit lan. There is one option here that explains how to improve conditions. However, even with that fix, I only got transfer speeds of around 5mb/s when transferring file-based VMs.
It may not help, but check DNS and network config between you and your ESXi server is setup. DNS in my ESXi was set up to be some random IP address which presumably did not help.
Installing the converter on the machine you want to transfer is much faster. So rather than targetting a .vmx file, you can tell it to transfer the “currently powered-on machine”. Doing this with a simple W7 machine achieved speeds of anywhere up to 14mb/s. (Not great if you want to transfer a non-Windows machine, though!)
You may encounter issues with VMs that have multiple virtual hard drives. I had a SQL Server with 3 separate drives installed, and whilst it did transfer all drives, with data intact, only the C: drive was alive when starting the machine. You may need to use DISKPART to get the other drives going again.

Will add more issues as I encounter them.

My VMWare ESXi build - Part 2 - Building ESXi

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:41:50 +0000

This is the second post in a series about running ESXi on a home server. See the first part, here.

ESXi is a free download from VMWare. You just need to register an account and install it. Simple huh? Well, not all the way. Two main issues:

I didn’t install an optical drive (intentionally, although with hindsight it would have been a bit easier to have one)
The Broadcam NetXtreme BCM57781 LAN card on my ASROCK board is not supported by ESXi. D’oh.

However, there are ways around this. If you’re running the same build as me, you should be able to follow these steps. If you’re using different hardware, substitute in the relevant bits!

My VMWare ESXi 5.1 build - Part 1 - The Hardware

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:20:28 +0000

This is the first part of a series on running ESXi on a home server. See the second part, here.

It’s a been a while since updating this blog. Apologies, but it’s mostly because I’ve been really busy. As part of that though, I use a lot of VMWare Virtual Machines. Being an Apple “fanboy” (gah) I use VMWare Fusion on my Macs which is great for running various virtual machines. (In fact, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 seem to run a hell of a lot better virtualised rather than natively. Go figure.)

Anyway, it got to a point where I decided I needed a bigger and more robust framework to run virtual machines on. Simply speaking, running one or two VMs on my Mac is fine, but when you need to run several at one time with limited resources, it starts to get a lot more involved. Given that VMWare ESXi Hypervisor is a free platform for running a single server VM host, I figured I’d experiment with building an ESXi server for home use. This blog post details some of the pain I went through in getting there.

Before I get started, there are a few terms I will use:

HOST - the physical machine, that is running ESXi
GUEST (or guest OS) - this is the virtual machine(s) that then runs on ESXi

And quickly:

What is ESXi

ESXi is a cut down linux kernel that acts as a hypervisor. That is, it’s a piece of software that runs on the physical machine, and then presents the physical hardware to the guest machines that want to use it. It in itself is not an OS. So they key difference here between say VMWare Fusion or Workstation is that you’re not running an edition of e.g., Windows Server which itself is running Virtual Machines - you’re, moreorless, cutting out the middle man.