{"id":321,"date":"2016-06-16T17:37:52","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T16:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/104.198.79.120\/?p=321"},"modified":"2016-06-16T19:38:32","modified_gmt":"2016-06-16T18:38:32","slug":"vmware-esxi-copy-vm-from-one-host-to-another-without-vcenter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/vmware-esxi-copy-vm-from-one-host-to-another-without-vcenter\/","title":{"rendered":"VMware ESXi Copy VM from one Host to another without vCenter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There comes a time in every sysadmin&#8217;s life when a second Virtual Machine Center is added to the inventory of awesomeness and soon You&#8217;ll find yourself reevaluating your current setup from a load balancing poing of view.<\/p>\n<p>Either way, moving around virtual machines within the same environment is for the most part a relatively painless process &#8211; even morese using VMware vCenter to manage your Hosts. However, for those of you who manage\u00a0ESXi \/ vSphere without it, there exists a free and simple solution to copy your vm from host to host, without the need to store the vm image at a temporary location, such as an USB drive.<\/p>\n<p>For this we&#8217;ll be using the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/my.vmware.com\/group\/vmware\/details?productId=491&amp;downloadGroup=OVFTOOL410\" target=\"_blank\">VMware Open Virtualization Format Tool (ovftool)<\/a>, which you should download and install on your system before reading any further (as of writing 4.1.0 is the current version &#8211; but this should work in the future as well. If not, please let me know!)<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Scenario<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>ESXi Host A [192.168.1.2]\u00a0<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>datastore1<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>\u00a0<strong>VM-Test<\/strong> virtual machine<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>ESXi Host B [192.168.1.3]<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>datastoreB<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>no virtual machines<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>The Steps<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Download and install <a href=\"https:\/\/my.vmware.com\/group\/vmware\/details?productId=491&amp;downloadGroup=OVFTOOL410\" target=\"_blank\">ovftool<\/a> if you haven&#8217;t already<\/li>\n<li>Run it using the following parameters (first defining the\u00a0<strong>destination<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>datastore<\/strong>, then the\u00a0<strong>source path<\/strong> followed by the\u00a0<strong>destination path<\/strong>). Under Mac OS X it would look like this:<br \/>\n<code>.\/ovftool -ds=datastoreB vi:\/\/root@192.168.1.2\/VM-Test vi:\/\/root@192.168.1.3<\/code><\/li>\n<li>Hopefully you have at least password protected your hosts (if not for passkey auth) so you&#8217;ll be asked for those, after which just sit back and wait for the completion<\/li>\n<li>Done!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>You can also use the optional\u00a0<strong>diskMode<\/strong> switch <code>-dm=thin<\/code> to set the destination vm disk to\u00a0<em>thin<\/em>, which can greatly reduce the transfer size (and thus the needed time) should you have a thick-provisioned source vm (or one with a lot of free space).<\/p>\n<p>For more info, check the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vmware.com\/support\/developer\/ovf\/ovf410\/ovftool-410_userguide.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">ovftool manual at VMware&#8217;s site<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There comes a time in every sysadmin&#8217;s life when a second Virtual Machine Center is added to the inventory of awesomeness and soon You&#8217;ll find yourself reevaluating your current setup from a load balancing poing of view. Either way, moving around virtual machines within the same environment is for the most part a relatively painless [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":325,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,27,6,17,7,23,26,28,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":328,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions\/328"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}