Everyone,
I am trying to move some Centos 7 guests off of a Centos 8 host to a VMware host machine. qemu-img is a great tool in kvm to convert the files from *.qcow2 to *.vmdk very easily with the command :
qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O vmdk *.qcow2 *.vmdk
I have been able to easily move these files to the 'usb vmware' system with scp from the Centos 8 host to the VmWare host. (Interesting in that I could not get the scp in the VMware host to work).
Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to import the files into VMware virtual machine yet. I can easily create a new virtual machine with a CentOS8 *.iso file which tells me that the Vmware host is working. I may have been looking in the wrong places for documentation, but so fare I have not been impressed with VMware's documentation to import pre-existing kvm guests.
Do any of you have any tutorial links as to how to import these *.vmdk files into VMware?
Thanks for your help!!!!
Greg Ennis
Everyone,
Everyone,
My final solution to the moving a Centos 7 machine to VMWare turned out to be the use of vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 that has to be executed on a Windows machine. I ran this product on a kvm guest Windows 10 machine and it worked very well. The transfer had to be done while the Centos 7 machine was booted. I have used this now to transfer a kvm guest Centos 7 machine and a physical machine Centos 7 both to VMWare.
There was a problem when I booted both machines that occurred at the beginning of the boot process before the kernel was accepted. The screen was filed with error messages which stated repetitively :
"error: can't find command ':'"
I had to enter a <Cr> several times to bypass the error messages and the the boot proceed normally.
I found : https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Converter-Standalone-Discussions/p2v-redha...
Apparently the VMWare converter has a bug in it that adds ": " to the beginning of a line that starts with "#" in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
All I needed to do was to edit grub.cfg and remove the ": " that was present in many of the lines that had previously been commented.
A reboot was normal.
If any of you find a way to do this task with Linux I would surely like to hear from you, but if you are looking for a way to make a migration from a physical machine or guest machine to VMWare this worked well.
Greg Ennis
Hi,
What I'm wondering here, what's the benefit of running the CentOS 7 machine on VMware instead of EL8?
Simon
Everyone,
My final solution to the moving a Centos 7 machine to VMWare turned out to be the use of vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 that has to be executed on a Windows machine. I ran this product on a kvm guest Windows 10 machine and it worked very well. The transfer had to be done while the Centos 7 machine was booted. I have used this now to transfer a kvm guest Centos 7 machine and a physical machine Centos 7 both to VMWare.
There was a problem when I booted both machines that occurred at the beginning of the boot process before the kernel was accepted. The screen was filed with error messages which stated repetitively :
"error: can't find command ':'"
I had to enter a <Cr> several times to bypass the error messages and the the boot proceed normally.
I found : https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Converter-Standalone-Discussions/p2v-redha...
Apparently the VMWare converter has a bug in it that adds ": " to the beginning of a line that starts with "#" in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
All I needed to do was to edit grub.cfg and remove the ": " that was present in many of the lines that had previously been commented.
A reboot was normal.
If any of you find a way to do this task with Linux I would surely like to hear from you, but if you are looking for a way to make a migration from a physical machine or guest machine to VMWare this worked well.
Greg Ennis
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 3:25 PM Simon Matter simon.matter@invoca.ch wrote:
Hi,
What I'm wondering here, what's the benefit of running the CentOS 7 machine on VMware instead of EL8?
Probably he has a vmware cluster that is in use already. I myself moved out of it to KVM primarily because of the lousy PCI passthrough ESXi has. Otherwise, it was rather stable. In any case, off-topic to the thread.
Simon
Everyone,
My final solution to the moving a Centos 7 machine to VMWare turned out to be the use of vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 that has to be executed on a Windows machine. I ran this product on a kvm guest Windows 10 machine and it worked very well. The transfer had to be done while the Centos 7 machine was booted. I have used this now to transfer a kvm guest Centos 7 machine and a physical machine Centos 7 both to VMWare.
There was a problem when I booted both machines that occurred at the beginning of the boot process before the kernel was accepted. The screen was filed with error messages which stated repetitively :
"error: can't find command ':'"
I had to enter a <Cr> several times to bypass the error messages and the the boot proceed normally.
I found : https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Converter-Standalone-Discussions/p2v-redha...
Apparently the VMWare converter has a bug in it that adds ": " to the beginning of a line that starts with "#" in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
All I needed to do was to edit grub.cfg and remove the ": " that was present in many of the lines that had previously been commented.
A reboot was normal.
If any of you find a way to do this task with Linux I would surely like to hear from you, but if you are looking for a way to make a migration from a physical machine or guest machine to VMWare this worked well.
Greg Ennis
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Hi,
What I'm wondering here, what's the benefit of running the CentOS 7 machine on VMware instead of EL8?
Simon -------------------------------------------------------------------
Simon,
It was not a pleasant decision for sure. The initial commitment of RedHat/IBM for the End of Life of C8 was through 2029. I created a hypervisor of C8 on a Dell R730xd server last November 2020 and everything was working very well with two C7 guests and one Windows guest on it. I had plans to move a mail server to it next.
I think it was in December 2020 or January 2021 that RedHat/IBM changed their commitment of the EOL of C8 from 2029 to December of this year 2021. They also have coined a new objective of the Centos platform. IBM owns it so they are free to do what they want with it, but I don't have much confidence that they will keep their remaining commitments.
I still had a lot of of new work I wanted to do with the C8 hypervisor, and did not want to start over after this December. I decided to make the move to a different platform as soon as I reasonably could.
I thought about migrating to Rocky Linux, but I was not sure if that platform would get off the ground in sufficient time.
It was a difficult decision for me...... Good Luck to you!!!!!!!!!
Greg
-
Gregory P. Ennis -
Mauricio Tavares -
Simon Matter