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I want to virtualize one of my existing operating systems (Ubuntu Server 12.04) to use the VM in my new ESXi setup. I know that I can use the vmware converter standalone client on my Windows laptop to do this, but if I understood correctly, both the Ubuntu Server and the ESXi server must be up and running at the same time to be able to perform the conversion, which at the moment is not possible.

So I was wondering? Is it possible to create a virtual machine from a physical drive (attached to the ESXi host) directly on the ESXi?

Hennes
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user1301428
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2 Answers2

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Keep in mind that ESXi has very limited support for storage controllers. You can't just slap the disk in any old random USB dock and get it working.

But yes, you can map a supported physical drive directly into a VM. Once you do that you could easily use a disk cloning tool with the VM to copy from your physical disk to a virtual disk if that is the direction you are going.

Zoredache
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  • At the moment the physical hard drive is directly connected to the motherboard of the ESXi server, and from the vSphere client I can see it attached to the machine. However, i don't seem to get the option to use it as the hard drive of a virtual machine running on ESXi, but maybe I am missing something here.. – user1301428 Apr 17 '14 at 21:15
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    Search for [ESXi raw device mapping](https://www.google.com/search?q=esxi+raw+device+mapping) online and in the docs for your version of ESXi. – Zoredache Apr 17 '14 at 21:34
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but if I understood correctly, both the Ubuntu Server and the ESXi server must be up and running at the same time to be able to perform the conversion

If you select VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine as the destination type the resulting VM will be output to a shared folder. You can then copy the resulting files to your ESXi storage and add the VM to the inventory.

As for the possible differences between a VMware Workstation VM and a natively created VM I have no idea but you could always convert the VMware Workstation VM to a native VM once it's been added to your ESXi inventory.

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joeqwerty
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  • Unfortunately this seems only available if you want to virtualize the local machine. At the moment I am trying to virtualize a remote machine and the only option I have is to save it to a server... – user1301428 Apr 17 '14 at 22:35
  • What version/build of the Converter are you running? I'm running version/build 5.0.0/470252 and I'm able to convert a remote machine with the method I described in my answer. – joeqwerty Apr 17 '14 at 23:03
  • I was running version 5.5, that explains it – user1301428 Apr 18 '14 at 12:09