I told you there were a few more of these. I was talking to my new manager Paul about some of the things that need to be documented. One of the items was what can Pure do from a migration perspective that others can’t. He mentioned a tool we use to do migrations and that there might be a play with vVOLs there. So I went digging into how some things work on the FlashArrary and in vCenter. Long story short the backing storage of a vVOL on pure is a volume. There are a number of volumes but one of them is the “Data” volume. This is the actual data the VM sees as it’s disk and is represented in vCenter as a vmdk that points uses the vVOL architecture to store the actual data.
Ok so what right? Well those of you know me can well imagine what all went through my head. Ok well maybe not all of it but you know I thought I can make that work. So I did the thing. You can take those Data volumes for a VM, clone them, present them to a Proxmox node, create a VM, attach that volume as a disk to the VM, and power it on. Boy that sounds easy right? It actually is to that point. But if you want to get off of the raw lun onto an LVM volume or qcow or nfs or something else just migrate the storage right? Sure. You try and it and let me know how it goes. A lot of this has to be done on the CLI and there a bunch of gotchas. I wrote a guide on how to do it manually and of course wrote a tool to do it for you. The guide is here: https://github.com/khensler/Quickstart-Guides/blob/main/Proxmox/migration/VMware-Proxmox-Manual-Migration.md and as soon as I put the finishing touches on the tool I’ll add another post with how it works and where it is.
Now word of caution. This is of course use at your own risk. It worked in my lab. You should try it in the lab before you try it in prod. There are also a number of other ways to migrate VMs. They may be more applicable or easier for you to use.
vSkeeBall 