CentOS 8 Host -> VMware Host

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Everyone,

I am trying to move some CentOS 7 guests off of a CentOS 8 host to a VMware host machine. qemu-img is a great tool in kvm to convert the files from *.qcow2 to *.vmdk very easily with the command :

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

I have been able to easily move these files to the ‘usb vmware’ system with scp from the CentOS 8 host to the VmWare host. (Interesting in that I could not get the scp in the VMware host to work).

Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to import the files into VMware virtual machine yet. I can easily create a new virtual machine with a CentOS8 *.iso file which tells me that the Vmware host is working. I may have been looking in the wrong places for documentation, but so fare I have not been impressed with VMware’s documentation to import pre-existing kvm guests.

Do any of you have any tutorial links as to how to import these *.vmdk files into VMware?

Thanks for your help!!!!

Greg Ennis

5 thoughts on - CentOS 8 Host -> VMware Host

  • Everyone,

    My final solution to the moving a CentOS 7 machine to VMWare turned out to be the use of vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 that has to be executed on a Windows machine. I ran this product on a kvm guest Windows 10 machine and it worked very well. The transfer had to be done while the CentOS 7 machine was booted. I have used this now to transfer a kvm guest CentOS 7 machine and a physical machine CentOS 7 both to VMWare.

    There was a problem when I booted both machines that occurred at the beginning of the boot process before the kernel was accepted. The screen was filed with error messages which stated repetitively :

    “error: can’t find command ‘:'”

    I had to enter a several times to bypass the error messages and the the boot proceed normally.

    I found :
    https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Converter-Standalone-Discussions/p2v-redhat-error-can-t-find-command/td-p/497444

    Apparently the VMWare converter has a bug in it that adds “: ” to the beginning of a line that starts with “#” in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

    All I needed to do was to edit grub.cfg and remove the “: ” that was present in many of the lines that had previously been commented.

    A reboot was normal.

    If any of you find a way to do this task with Linux I would surely like to hear from you, but if you are looking for a way to make a migration from a physical machine or guest machine to VMWare this worked well.

    Greg Ennis

  • Hi,

    What I’m wondering here, what’s the benefit of running the CentOS 7
    machine on VMware instead of EL8?

    Simon

  • Probably he has a vmware cluster that is in use already. I
    myself moved out of it to KVM primarily because of the lousy PCI
    passthrough ESXi has. Otherwise, it was rather stable. In any case, off-topic to the thread.

  • Hi,

    What I’m wondering here, what’s the benefit of running the CentOS 7
    machine on VMware instead of EL8?

    Simon
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