I decided to migrate from a VMware ESXi hypervisor to Proxmox due to some limitations to the free tier of ESXi and compatibility issues with gigabit ethernet adapters. Although I encountered some snags, it was a straightforward migration. Here’s how I did it.
- Export ESXi VMs
- Power down each VM
- Export them as OVA (you really only need the exported vmdk file)
- I saved them to separate storage than what was being used for ESXi
- If you use static IP addresses for particular MAC addresses, take a note of those
- Create Proxmox USB Installer
- Install Proxmox
- I recall this being very straightforward. Just follow the prompts
- Copy VMs Exports (vmdks) to Proxmox
- If you saved them to external storage, you should be able to mount the drive in Proxmox CLI
- If you exported them to another computer, you can start Python SimpleHTTP Server in the directory where the exports live, and use curl in the Proxmox CLI to download them
- Create VMs for each VM to import
- To import the disk, you will need to create a VM in Proxmox. Actually, you can follow this guide
- Snags
- Configure UEFI where needed
- One of my VMs wouldn’t boot; it got stuck at “Booting from hard disk…”. This was resolved when I switched the BIOS from SeaBIOS to OVMF (UEFI)
- Default graphics didn’t work for one of my VMs
- I needed to modify the Display hardware settings to use SPICE
- Configure UEFI where needed
There you have it. I do not know if others have experienced this, but I have found booting up my Linux VMs in Proxmox is actually way faster compared to booting them up in ESXi.
Shanief is a seasoned cyber security professional, with over 8 years of diverse experience in enterprise intrusion detection, response and threat hunting.