Migrate VMs between Scale Servers

[NickF]

Hi all,

I've migrated several VMs from my ESXI server to SCALE for testing. I followed this nice little write up by someone here in the community. Everything went fairly smooth, despite being a long-ish process, not many complaints.

If possible I'd like to migrate some of the VMs from one host running SCALE to another host running SCALE. Obviously, this is far less involved than converting VMDKs to img files and then writing those image files out to a ZVOL. The data migration part for the virtual hard drives is fairly straight forward, and you would only need to do a ZFS send/receive "Replication Task" using the semi-automated method in the GUI.

But, when I did the migration from VMWare I obviously had to generate new VMs associated with those disks. This caused me to do a few additional steps, reconfiguring IPs, relicensing some software, that kind of thing. Is there a way to transfer the VM files and re-register them on another SCALE host so I can preserve things like the BIOS serial number, vNIC MAC Address' and any other GUIDs that may be stored in them? Are they stored some place I can SCP and grab them, move them over to the other system and trick the middleware on the other system into "seeing" them?

 

[sretalla]

The MAC address of the NIC can be set under the VM devices section.

Things like BIOS serial can be set in KVM by editing the VM config file, but in SCALE that's something created at start time, so doesn't exist to be copied unless the VM is running (and is deleted/overwritten anyway on each start/stop).

The source of that file is what's in the config DB of TrueNAS, so there's nothing to trick and you're probably out of luck for now as there are very limited options (certainly not BIOS serial) able to be set.

You can certainly just replicate the zvol and give it a try to see how it goes, but I wouldn't hold a lot of hope for exactly what you want for the moment... maybe look in Jira for the feature requests around KVM config and upvote or add one.

 

[NickF]

Fair enough. Will proceed that way.

 

[Casobs2]

I am currently trying to do the same. I have been following the right, but when I boot, it just goes to the UEFI shell. I tried "boot from file" in the EFI screen, and there is nothing there. I am not sure what I have done wrong. I uploaded the file, I performed the first dd command and it went though, but have interpreted that the second dd command and rsync are a comparison? Is this correct? or am I just bad at following directions?

 

[NickF]

I am currently trying to do the same. I have been following the right, but when I boot, it just goes to the UEFI shell. I tried "boot from file" in the EFI screen, and there is nothing there. I am not sure what I have done wrong. I uploaded the file, I performed the first dd command and it went though, but have interpreted that the second dd command and rsync are a comparison? Is this correct? or am I just bad at following directions?

Were your VMs UEFI boot to begin with? If they were BIOS you need to make sure its BIOS now. If it were UEFI you need to make sure its UEFI now.

What did you try for your SCSI driver? You'll probably be stuck with the LSI emulated "AHCI" one for now.

Some combination of those two things will help you get them going. I just don't know what you did before to be more specific.