The Idiot clumsily migrates VMware VMs into ProxmoxVE

A quick and dirty guide on how to migrate VMware VMs to Proxmox Virtual Environment. Tested in the 5.0 Beta.

1. Remove VMware Tools from the VM you wish to migrate
2. Download and Run the MergeIDE registry edit to make the system bootable by IDE
3. Shut down the VM in VMWare
4. Convert the VMDK Files to a single grow-able file utilizing vmware-vdiskmanager (may be a separate download)
5. Windows Command C:/location/of/vmware/vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -r tobeconverted.vmdk -t 0 converted-pve.vmdk
6. Allow conversion to take place
7. Alter your local storage on Proxmox node to allow Disk Images
8. Datacenter > Storage > Local
9. Create a KVM VM using the Proxmox web gui, with the hard disk (type VMware) stored on local (not local-lvm)
10. Do not start the VM
11. Take note of the VM ID (i.e. 109)
12. SCP into the Proxmox node, navigate to “/var/lib/vz/images/VMID”
13. Delete the disk associated with the VM (i.e. vm-109-disk1)
14. Upload the converted VMDK, after renaming it appropriately
15. Go into the Proxmox web gui and select “Move Disk”, select “local-lvm” as the target
16. Delete the source, if you want
17. Allow disk to be moved, which may take a few minutes
18. Start the VM in Proxmox, check progress on the console.

Note: While Proxmox can use VMWare VMs, they are not the most performative format.  If you want to go one step further (at the cost of a little backwards compatibility), simply convert the disk images from VMWare with the built in qemu-img utility.

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 winServer.vmdk winServer.qcow2