- #Vmware vcenter converter standalone esxi how to#
- #Vmware vcenter converter standalone esxi install#
In this article, we will look at how to copy VMware VMs directly between ESXi hosts using the OVF Tool. Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is an industry standard for describing metadata about virtual machine images in XML format. The VMware OVF Tool is available for many platforms, including Windows, Linux, and MAC OSX. The OVF Tool provides a lot of features, such as importing and exporting OVFs, converting between any VMware-supported format (VMX, OVF, OVA, vCloud Director, etc.), signing OVF packages, and validating OVF package signatures-and many more. In the case of standalone ESXi hosts, you could copy VMs between ESXi hosts by leveraging some of the tools, like VMware Converter, or you could even export the virtual machine to the jump host Windows system and then import the same into the destination host, but all this would take a while and you are dependent on a middle-man system for the VMware Converter installation or during import and export.Īnother option is the OVF Tool.
If you have a budget for P2V/V2V software, there are other commercial products that do exist, and we have used, which you may want to investigate.
VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 is a free product, but it does have some limitations, P2V and V2V have to be conducted manually, also you may find some conversions troublesome and difficult.
#Vmware vcenter converter standalone esxi install#
With this program also, you have to install the latest VMware P2V vCenter Converter version. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in California. One can download this amazing program from the VMware official website. In How to Import a Virtual Machine into ESXi Part 1: P2V Migration, I described cold and hot migrations, the difference between physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migrations, and how to perform a P2V migration using VMware vCenter Converter. But what if you don't have a vCenter server but only standalone ESXi hosts? How can you move or copy VMs between ESXi hosts when you have standalone ESXi hosts that are not managed by vCenter servers? Users can go with VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, which is a no-cost tool for converting physical and virtual servers to VMware VMs. Similarly, copying a VM or a VM template between ESXi hosts is very simple when you have the vCenter server-you can simply clone the VM to the target ESXi host or even deploy a VM from VM templates wherever you want in the vCenter server. This migration is possible when you have a vCenter server and both source and target ESXi hosts are managed by the vCenter Server.