VMware ESXi 4.1 : how to copy machines from USB disk?

Question

I want to get rid of my old ESX server (installed with OS) and move the machines to an ESXi server. I copied my machines on USB disk, but ESXi 4.1 doesn't seem to detect USB disk. Is there a way to "mount it" or some other way to access USB drive from VMware ?

USB disk is formatted with ext3 filesystem.

Answer 1

Finally, we had to do it the following way :

• Create a temporary ESXi
• Create a PC installed with Windows 7 and with enough disk space

And the solution was to :

• suppress all snapshots
• shut down the ESX server
• copy the VM files to the PC with Windows 7
• install vmware-converter on the PC with Windows 7
• convert from local files with the temporary ESXi server as destination ...only then, it was possible to copy them to the new ESXi server (which was the old ESX server, reformatted).

By the way, an important advice : don't convert your virtual machines to a too-recent version, otherwise you will not be able to modify them anymore from ESXi client, you will have to install a vSphere server.

Answer 2

Caveats:

1) Accessing an externally attached USB flash or disk drive inside ESXi, where one has visibility to the VM images as stored on disk, requires that the USB arbitrator, which makes USB drives available for USB passthrough, be disabled. Consult https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1038228 for the procedure to disable USB passthrough and do so prior to attaching an external USB drive for best results.

2) You say that you copied your "machines on USB disk" that is "formatted with ext3 filesystem". That could have only be done inside a VM because ESXi has no support for ext3 filesystem nor even for FAT32 (up through at least ESXi 6.5 and probably later due to patent issues with FAT32). It does have support for FAT16 and the proprietary VMFS filesystems used to hold virtual machines.

How to do this:

1. Shut down any and all VMs that you want to copy.
2. Disable USB passthrough (see above) and then attach your USB disk.
3. Access the ESXi command line and format your USB disk with VMFS (Google vmfstools).
4. Verify that you can put a small text file on the USB disk and cd away from the disk before detaching it from the old host. The purpose of the "cd away" is similar to the procedure required on Windows prior to detaching a USB disk.
5. Disable USB passthrough on the new host and attach the USB disk and verify that you can read the text file. Then cd away from the disk and detach it and go back to the old host.
6. Copy your VMs using cp and then cd away from the USB disk and etc.

FWIW I'm sure that doing this is unsupported but it should work if you're careful and the USB disk is large enough. It's also the case that if you have a cluster up it's much easier to just use storage vMotion but small shops may not have that luxury. Good luck!