Migration of servers to Proxmox VE

Introduction

You can migrate existing servers to Proxmox VE.

Physical server to Proxmox VE (KVM)

There are free tools (like VMware Converter) available to migrate a physical host to VMware. So the first step is to migrate the physical server to a VMware image. The second step is to follow the howto "VMware to Proxmox VE (KVM)".

VMware to Proxmox VE (KVM)

This howto describes the migration of a Windows 2003 Server (or Windows XP) from VMware to Proxmox VE (KVM).

Prepare the Windows operating system

Before you begin make a copy of the VMware image.

Remove VMware tools

Start the Windows virtual machine on VMware and remove the VMware tools via the Windows control panel. Reboot.

Enable IDE in the registry

• Start the Windows virtual machine on VMware and execute the mergeide.reg (see Microsoft KB article for details). Now the registry is changed that your Windows can boot from IDE, necessary for KVM.
• Shutdown Windows.

Prepare the disk file

My disk file used for this howto: win2003.vmdk

• Change your VMDK disk file with vmware-vdiskmanager.exe to a single file (vmware-vdiskmanager.exe is located in your VMware installation path, e.g. "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server")

vmware-vdiskmanager -r win2003.vmdk -t 0 win2003-pve.vmdk

• copy the win2003-pve.vmdk to your Proxmox VE server into the following dir: /var/lib/vz/images (I used WinSCP as I worked on a Windows desktop)
• Change the win2003-pve.vmdk file to KVM

qemu-img convert -f vmdk win2003-pve.vmdk -O qcow2 win2003-pve.qcow2

Physical server (or XEN or VMware or other) to Proxmox VE (Container)

tbd. see Physical_to_container