[AusNOG] Re Question about ESXI and importing data from a HDD

[Paul Gear]

On 08/14/2013 11:19 AM, Will Dowling wrote:
>> Got a linux HDD from an installation that is required again. As we 
>> now have esxi infrastructure how does one make an esxi image from a HDD
>> I don’t know of any other then to power it up and use a convertor to 
>> import it, but before I go to that trouble is there any other way?
>
> VMWare actually have a (now) free tool that can do this conversion for 
> you:
> http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/features.html
>
> It will import various disk image formats and push it across to your 
> ESXi instance, so you can use your tool of choice for creating the image.
> Not sure if its still included, but it used to have a bootable ISO to 
> do dump over the wire in the same manner also.

That works pretty well for most Windows machines (but not ones with EFI 
BIOS), but I've had very little success on Linux systems.  By contrast, 
the method of booting from live CD and using dd that Giles recommended 
has worked 100% of the time for me on Linux guests.

Paul