Baremetal 5.2 moving to ESXi 6.1?

[Monkeymonkey76]

Hi,

 

I'm currently using a baremetal machine for XPEnology and I'm in the process of moving all physical devices into a ESXi box. I'm using 5.2 on the baremetal and I've seen on here that 6.1 looks like it's about to be released so I'd like to go with that on the ESXi machine when ready.

 

What's the best way to migrate the systems over? Anything I should watch out for?

[Monkeymonkey76]

Any thoughts or suggestions? 

[Olegin]

Install ESXi, in ESXi make RDM (Raw Disk Mapping) for your physical disk's:

cd /vmfs/volumes/<your_datastore_name>/<virtual_machine_name>
ls -l /vmfs/devices/disks/
vmkfstools -r /vmfs/devices/disks/<deviceID> example.vmdk 

Create VM with your disk's, clean install 6.1. without formatting data partitions on disks.

 

 

[Monkeymonkey76]

Do I need to use RDM? I had planned to use virtual disks. 

[Balrog]

If you have an extra controller like e.g. an IBM M1015 or similar in "IT Mode" you can give the whole controller to the VM (called "passthrough") and have no need for making RDMs for the single hard disks.

 

 

[Olegin]

48 минут назад, Monkeymonkey76 сказал:

Do I need to use RDM? I had planned to use virtual disks. 

It's your choise. If you don't need to use data on disks from your 5.2., you can make virtual disks.

[Monkeymonkey76]

It's a HP Gen 8 and I'm just using the built in controller (although I'm aware it's not amazing) so no extra controllers for now. 

I'm going to use the discs from the other machine in the ESXi machine but I don't mind losing the data and starting from scratch.