Moving VM from ESXi to Freenas

TrueNAS General
1

Hello,

Hoping someone can give me some pointers, I have a VM that has been deployed in VMWare ESXI, the image is provided as an OVF/OVA file, is there any method that can be used to deploy this into FreeNAS? as I would like to move the VM off from the ESXi server and have it hosted separately?

The options i am seeing in FreeNAS is to create a new VM from scratch or use an image from a catalogue.

2

Do you mean TrueNAS Scale or TrueNAS Core? FreeNAS was quite a while ago.

3
  • download the disk image (vmdk) from ESXi
  • use e.g. qemu-img to convert the image to raw, possibly on your desktop machine
  • create virtual machine in TrueNAS with a virtual disk of suffcicient size
  • that will give you a zvol in ZFS for the virtual disk
  • use dd to write the raw image to the zvol (after copying the image to TrueNAS)

This works for both TrueNAS CORE and CE.

I am not at home atm, so I cannot check - possibly qemu-img is installed on TrueNAS CE, already, and you can copy over the vmdk, then convert on TrueNAS. I doubt the tool is present on CORE, but might be mistaken.

4

Hi @SmallBarky.

Sorry its TrueNAS-SCALE

5

Hi @pmh ,

Thank you for the information, I will try this in a couple of weeks when I have time to spend on this, plus I will hopefully be building a new TrueNas Scale server then.

6

I can confirm it’s installed on CE. I’ve used it to convert an image to raw and write it to the zvol in a single step :slightly_smiling_face:

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