ADLER-TECH

Practical Migration: VMware to Proxmox VE

Duration: 3 days (8 hours/day) — total 24h
Target audience: Sysadmins/Infra engineers who must plan and execute real migrations with minimal downtime.

Day 1 — Assessment & Preparation

  1. Project scoping & risk analysis
    • Inventory, SLAs, downtime windows, rollback criteria.
  2. Environment discovery
    • VM catalog, vCPU/RAM/disk layouts, snapshots, dependencies, apps.
  3. Storage & networking mapping
    • VMware datastores → Proxmox pools (ZFS/LVM/Directory/Ceph), VLANs, NIC mapping.
  4. Proxmox target design
    • Node sizing, cluster vs single-node, storage choices, backup plan.
  5. Migration strategy options
    • Offline cold export, disk conversion (qemu-img), OVF/OVA import, live/near-live patterns, staged migration.

Day 2 — Tools, Conversion & Transfer

  1. Tooling overview
    • qemu-img, scp/rsync, vmware-export, ovftool, Proxmox qm importdisk/qmrestore, vzdump/pct restore.
  2. Disk format conversion
    • VMDK → raw/qcow2, sparse vs preallocated, thin/thick considerations, compression, checksums.
  3. VM configuration translation
    • CPU topology, NUMA, virtual NIC types, bootloader adjustments, cloud-init, serial console.
  4. Guest OS readiness
    • Remove VMware tools, install QEMU guest agent, drivers, adjust network interface names, cloud-init userdata.
  5. Transfer mechanics
    • Efficient transfer (direct host-to-host, streaming convert), bandwidth throttling, integrity checks.

Day 3 — Migration Execution, Validation & Post-Migration

  1. Test migration (lab)
    • Full dry-run, functional tests, performance baseline comparison.
  2. Cutover planning & execution
    • Freeze window, final delta sync, DNS/Load balancer updates, validation checklist.
  3. Rollback & contingency
    • Quick rollback path, snapshot/backup-based restore, cutback criteria.
  4. Post-migration hardening
    • Install guest agent, backups to PBS, monitoring (Prometheus/Zabbix), performance tuning.
  5. Automation & bulk migration
    • Scripting conversions, Ansible playbooks, batching VMs, scheduling.
  6. Compliance & licensing considerations
    • Windows licensing, vendor support implications, documentation.