Monday, February 6, 2012

moving a virtual machine from VMWare Workstation/Fusion to vSphere

I'm currently in the process of moving several virtual machine from my home system (VMWare Workstation) and my work system (VMWare Fusion) to my new vSphere ESXI server and running into all kinds of issues.

First of all you can't run the converter on anything else than windows, which is rather annoying. Since I only got macs at work and no Windows machines, except for mine at home. Which has no access to the work network and I refuse to carry my 50lbs workstation around.

Translation: VMWare forces me to install a windows virtual machine to convert a virtual machine from vmx to vSPhere.

Yes I am slightly irritated about this lack of support for us apple fan boys (don't forget, linuxers have todo the same)

The next issue I encountered there doesn't seem to be a possibility to define Nat/Bridged and host only anymore. Instead I need to deal with custom vlans now or possible mixup some other DHCP services in the office.

For example my rocks linux cluster for testing binbase has 3 virtual network interfaces:

eth0 = host only (fixed IP address, fixed MAC)
eth1 = host only (fixed IP address, fixed MAC, for cluster nodes)
eth2 = bridge (dynamic ip address, random MAC, so that external hosts can easily access BinBase from the world and the image has internet access)

this is rather straight forward in VMware player/fusion/workstation.

Now for vSphere it looks rather different...

Basically you need to define networks for each interface and so my best idea was to simulate this so far.

To simulate the host only network:

a) create a new switch called 'host only' which is not connected to a network device.

To simulate the bridged network:

just use the default location and rename it to public to simplify life a bit.

and assign them in the vWware image to the different network interfaces.

etho0 = host only
eth1 = host only
eth2 = public

now the big question is, if I created another virtual machine, in the same ip range as my host only network is defined, can it talk to the other machines? I think I shall test this with a virtual compute node and report back. Maybe to be on the save site, I just create a second host only network?

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