How to migrate a VMWare vmdk to Proxmox 4.4 with local-lvm storage

That's a workaround for importing vmdk to proxmox vm. And that is what I've done.

1) You can as its as a lvm. You can look at https://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm about lvm. Brief structure;

• pv physical volumes like /dev/sdb1
• vg volume groups, group of physical volumes
• lv logical volumes, allocations from vg
  • like /dev/vgname/lvname , you size it

So:

you can see it

lvdisplay

you can mkfs, but careful on proxmox

mkfs.ext4 /dev/vgname/lvname

you can mount it

mount /dev/vgname/lvname /mnt/lvname

2) You must first check vmdk image size. This is important because you can not put a larger image on a smaller block device. details: https://askubuntu.com/questions/657562/extracting-qcow2-image-to-a-smaller-real-drive/657682

qemu-img info disk0.vmdk

image: disk0.vmdk
file format: vmdk
virtual size: 82G (88081432576 bytes)
disk size: 2.0G

You can see disk size, it is vmdk file's disk usage. And virtual size, it is vm's harddisk size.

Then, you create a vm with 82G "ide" disk (in my case)

You can check disk path with:

lvdisplay

Then you copy vmdk over it in raw format:

qemu-img convert -p -O raw disk0.vmdk /dev/vgname/vm-111-disk-1

That's it, works for me.

For size problem, you can resize your vmdk with qemu-img resize your.vmdk 82G or you can resize vm's disk size on web interface. But you MUST check qemu-img info to be sure vmdk smaller than vm's disk.

You can upload files with SFTP or use USB as you can see above. Use different directories or disks, or mount them if it's necessary.

You can use SMB on proxmox, smbclient is already installed I guess. This is not going to break proxmox. Maybe security issues, you can check open ports on proxmox, and limit them for some IP subnets.

I'm going through something similar. I had some vm images running on Open Media Vault. OMV supports regular plain vanilla KVM using tools like virsh. I wanted to move the images to my new server running Proxmox 6.1.

First I exported the image from OMV as a qcow2 file and moved it to my Proxmox server. Then in Proxmox I created a "Directory" style storage. Directory storage is tied to an underlying directory on the physical file system - in my case it was a location /data. When the "Directory" storage is created, a number of subdirectories are automatically created in the file system directory. The directory that holds the vm images is called images. There is also a directory created called vm-images so don't get confused.

I created a new VM in Proxmox, specifying the "Directory" storage and using a qcow2 format. That created a file /data/images/$VM_ID/vm-$VM_ID-disk-0.qcow2 where $VM_ID is the numeric identifier of the VM, which usually starts with 100 and goes up. I used the exported qcow2 file to overwrite that one.

That works and I was able to start the VM but apparently using the qcow2 file on the filesystem isn't all that efficient. So then in the web ui I went to the VM's hardware pane, selected the hard disk, and then used the "Move disk" button. This allowed me to copy the disk image to another storage medium, and it also converted it from a qcow2 file to the raw format. I could use the "Delete source" checkbox when doing the move, or I could delete the source from the /data/images/$VM_ID/ directory later. This move can even be done while the VM is running.

While I was doing this, by the way, some of my VMs became all but unresponsive. It was my own fault. First, the data directory is made up of a mirrored pair of Western Digital Red 3TB drives. The WD Red drives are designed for long life and reliability in file servers. They are conventional 5200 rpm drives so they are comparatively slow. Second, I had an rsync job writing about 1.5TB of data to the mirrored pair at the same time. Those drives couldn't handle the I/O of the rsync job and hosting the virtual drives for several VMs at the same time. The "I/O Delay" in the pve node summary panel in the web ui showed values greater than 50%. I/O Delay is the same as wait time that one would normally see with top. When I moved the VM image storage to different devices everything was fine.

My other Proxmox mistake is that one of the vms I moved was a Linux "desktop" (Linux Mint) that uses the Cinnamon desktop environment. The Mint project basically takes Ubuntu Linux and combines it with a well polished Cinnamon for a very nice Linux Desktop experience. But Cinnamon is a dog if you don't have a GPU. The OMV "server" was an older gaming PC that I got second hand. It has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560. It wasn't a good GPU, but Cinnamon doesn't need a good one, just any at all. The Proxmox server was a real server. It didn't have a GPU at all.

I couldn't even log into the VM, through the console. I used ctrl-alt-f3 to get to the command line, ran sudo apt install mint-meta-mate to install the mate desktop, then ran sudo update-alternatives --config x-session-manager to select Mate as the default. That works fine even without a GPU.