Using Veeam to Migrate from Vmware to Proxmox

[seizurebot]

Hi everyone,

I have read a few guides and watched some YouTube videos and it seems like Veeam makes it very simple to restore VMs between different hypervisors. I am a long time user of VMware and Veeam and I am looking to move my single host setup from VMware to Proxmox. I am concerned about data loss because I only have one host and am therefore unable to run both hypervisors in tandem. I have a stable and established backup chain in Veeam and I am hoping that I am OK creating a synthetic full to speed up this migration project.

One of my Vmware VMs has a non-standard disk layout and I have questions about how the VM restore process is going to handle that : ESXI will only allow a max size of 62TB for any one virtual disk so I assigned two such virtual disks to my Windows 2019 VM and then I configured them as one spanned volume in Windows disk mgmt. This VMware limitation is one of the main reasons why I am moving to Proxmox. Can I restore from VMware to Proxmox in a way that it will no longer be two smaller 62TB disks but one large 124TB volume? I am not 100% if file-level restores are possible between VMware and Proxmox, or if I'm forced to restore the entire VM. I have doubts that an entire VM restore would complete successfully because of these questionable compromises that I made when I was all-in on my VMware setup.

I appreciate any and all comments, ideas, suggestions.

[rovshan.pashayev]

Hello,

Can you clarify what you meant here:

hoping that I am OK creating a synthetic full to speed up this migration project

When you restore your VMware backup to Proxmox, Veeam will recreate the two 62TB volumes separately.
You won't be able to combine them into a single 124TB volume during the restore process, as this would require risky operations on the file system. Please consider such actions to be performed manually and with great caution.

And it won't be possible to perform a file-level restore (FLR), restore guest files, directly between a VMware backup and a Proxmox VE VM.

[Kochkin]

Might be handy to publish VM disks from backup, mount them to the target VM and copy the required files (as a bit more complicated version of FLR). See https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbpro ... html?ver=1

[seizurebot]

I've never used the publish feature before. What steps would I need to follow to get a bootable VM?

Would I create an empty VM in proxmox with two virtual disks, and then manually copy the C:\ files to disk 1 and all other files to disk 2? Is file level restore between hypervisors a planned feature for a future release? I'm not in a hurry to get started on this and I can wait for FLR to be a supported feature.

[rovshan.pashayev]

Hello

The publishing disk feature does not serve to make any VM bootable. Please see the user guide that was shared: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbpro ... html?ver=1.

You can create an empty VM in Proxmox VE with two virtual disks (or even one larger virtual disk), publish the disks of VMware backup, the empty VM will be the target server, and then copy the files and folders into it.

[seizurebot]

I think I have an order of operations that will work for this migration.

1. Create a new backup with all disks attached.
2. Remove both 62TB drives from the VMware VM, and then run another backup.
3. Restore the full VM from VMware to proxmox using the latest backup, it should only be 20GB or so with one C:\ plus all the hidden partitions that make it bootable. Make sure it boots.
4. In proxmox add a second 124TB virtual drive to the recently migrated VM.
5. Publish the second-newest backup of this VM from a time when those extra drives were attached, copy the files to proxmox.

Does this make sense? Will it work?

[rovshan.pashayev]

Hello,

It might be a successful order; just make sure that each step is satisfactory and that you can revert them in case of failure.

[nathano]

oof, no spare hardware out of interest what are backing up to? that's going to take quite some time to restore that much data, I assume you've factored that time in to your outage window?

Have you used pve before? If you have a spare PC or anything that can run proxmox I would be installing pve on there and at least trying the restore of the OS drive and understand the process for restoring etc. goign back to the point about data restore time you could have a small window that you need to get pve installed, updated, added to VBR and then start the restore.. so if you can practice that it's probably a good thing

[EdFromOhio]

my single host setup from VMware to Proxmox. I am concerned about data loss

I know this wasn't your question, but have you given serious thought to having at least a second host? I wouldn't sleep well at night knowing all my VM's are running on a single server. Bad stuff happens, and when (not if) I have a host crash, all my VM's automatically boot up on surviving hosts. It also makes server maintenance much easier to do since the VM's can be moved off to allow a host to be powered off, updated, whatever. That all assumes you have shared storage and not everything stored on the local server's disks.

Related to your original question, what's the chances you have an extra 124TB temporarily available? That would make it easy to simply create a new volume in your fully restored VM, copy the files you need over to the new 124TB volume, then delete the original volumes. Hopefully you created separate VMware disks to make deletion easier, which it sounds like you must have done in order to get 62TB volumes.

[stealthmi]

I just recently was testing moving from ESXi to Proxmox. I was running B&R 12.2 and the restore to Proxmox kept failing with an error about too many CPU's in the VM. I had opened a support ticket to determine the problem and was of course told that all software needed to be on the latest versions. My ESXi was only on 6.0 and I assumed that was the problem. I tested with 7.0 and 8.0. None of them would allow the VM to restore correctly to Proxmox. The fix was upgrading to B&R 12.3. I went back to my original ESXi 6.0 host and tried the restore to Proxmox again, this time with B&R 12.3 and it worked fine.