Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Move linux XenServer guest virtual machines to VMWare

I was working on a project to move a bunch of virtual machines from a XenServer 6.5 cluster to VMWare ESXi with vSphere 6.5.  The windows guest all moved over without issue using VMWare's vCenter Converter.  The linux guests all gave me issues though. I could move them over but but thy would not boot up afterwords.  I'd simply get a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left.  I spent hours troubleshooting.  Many false starts later I finally stumbled across this script that solved my problems.

Please download/copy the xen-vmware-prep.sh script from https://gist.github.com/kamermans/184192af5a16124ec623

  1.  Snapshot the source VM in XenServer console.  The script makes changes to the system that will name it unbootable in Xen.
  2. Copy the xen-vmware-prep.sh script to the source server and run as root.
     
  3. Use VMWare vCenter Converter to live copy the source vm over to the VMWare infrastructure.
     
  4. Shutdown the source system and boot up the copy on vmware.
  5.  
NOTE: I did not write this script and do take any credit for the it.  It saved my bacon and is thus worth promoting.