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How to Copy VMs Directly Between ESXi Hosts Without Shared Storage

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There were some discussions earlier this week about copying Virtual Machines from one ESXi host to another ESXi host that reminded me of a very cool feature in the ovftool that could help with this task(which I thought I had written about already). As you probably have guessed by now, I am a big fan of the ovftool and have written several articles here, here and here. It still surprises me with the amount of features this little utility contains and this particular one is definitely a cool one!

If you have ever needed to copy a Virtual Machine from one host to another, it can be a challenge sometimes, especially if you do not have shared storage. You can of course leverage tools like VMware Converter or exporting the VM to a "middle man" system and then re-importing that VM into the destination host but it could take awhile or you have to run a Windows system. Well, if you are looking for a quick and easy way to copy a VM from one host to another, try using the ovftool.

In this example, I have two ESXi hosts called vESXi-03 and vESXi-04 and they both contain a single local datastore (no shared storage). I have a VM called vMA5 that is located on vESXi-03 and I would like to copy that directly to vESXi-04 without needing any additional storage.

Here is an example of using ovftool to probe the ESXi host to see the list of available VMs:

Note: A VM must be powered off for ovftool to transfered or exported.

Now that we have identified our VM, we just need to specify the source ESXi host and the destination ESXi host as well as the datastore using the -ds option. Here is an example of using ovftool to export the VM from one ESXi host to another ESXi host:

There are also other options that you can specify such as the network configuration and power options, please refer to the ovftool documentation for more details.

If you open up a vSphere Client connection to each of your ESXi hosts, you will see that the source host will have an export task and the destination host will have an import task as shown in the screenshot below:

Pretty nifty huh? 🙂

If anyone is interested in how this works, the system that is running ovftool acts as a proxy between your source and destination. The system running ovftool IS in the data path during the transfer but its only for the data to stream from source->client->destination. Nothing is stored on the client system and you do not need to have the storage capacity of what you are transferring. This is very nifty little feature that many people are not aware of with ovftool.

Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter in Apple Mac Mini on ESXi 5

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If you followed Apple's recent announcement at their WWDC conference then you would know that they just released a Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter. So, why am I talking about this? Well if you are running ESXi 5 on an Apple Mac Mini like me, then you are probably wondering if you can get another network interface on the Mini as it only has a single network adapter. The answer is YES!

To get ESXi 5 to recognize the Thunderbolt adapter, you will need to download and install an additional Broadcom driver (tg3 3.123b.v50.1) or you can create a customized ISO with the driver built in using the steps outlined here for a new installation.

UPDATE (12/21): A custom ESXi ISO is no longer needed, you can use ESXi 5.0 Update 2 which includes the necessary driver to support Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter. Please take a look at this article here for the details.

If you are just installing the driver on an existing ESXi 5 installation, extract the offline bundle and upload to your ESXi host and run the following command:

esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/mini-local-datastore-1/tg3-3.123b.v50.1-offline_bundle-682322.zip

Here is the output from ESXCLI on how ESXi sees the Thunderbolt adapter:

As you can see, it shows up with no description for the device and this is the same when running lspci, it just shows up as a network controller from Broadcom. This is not a big deal, but I assume this has something to do with the high numbering of the vmnic instead of being vmnic1 it's vmnic32.

I also performed some basic network testing by yanking the ethernet cable on the onboard network adapter and ensured traffic continued to flow and vice versa with the other Thunderbolt adapter. Everything works beautifully and now you can have some network redundancy built into your Mac Mini or if you need the throughput for all those VMs you plan on running 😉

Big thanks to Randy K. for hooking me up with a Thunderbolt adapter!

 

OVF Runtime Environment

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I recently noticed a trend of questions from various users about extracting specific bits of information such as the version of ESXi that's running or the MoRef ID of the VM, all while within the guestOS. I had already written an article about this topic awhile back called How to extract host information from within a VM? but it seems like there is still a continued interest to easily obtain this information about the underlying vSphere infrastructure from within the guestOS.

I came across another method while researching a different topic which is to use the vApp property of a VM called the OVF runtime environment. This is a feature that has been around since the early days of vSphere 4.x, if not earlier which provides a mechanism to retrieve some of this information as well as custom properties. The OVF feature provides users with the capability to pass in any type of metadata information such as application start up parameters, network configuration, password management, etc. directly into the guestOS for flexible guest customization.

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