Importing VMs to Proxmox from VMware and the Cloud

If you are looking to migrate away from VMware to Proxmox or get started quickly with Open Virtualization Archive (OVA) templates, there are a couple of features that you should investigate.

Importing from VMware

Proxmox’s VMware import functionality is straightforward but effective.

To import a VM from VMware, you first need to mount the VMware datastore(s) as storage in Proxmox.

The connection is made directly to the ESXi host rather than vSphere, and needs for SSH to be enabled on the ESXi host.

Rather than being a restriction, this will actually work in your favour if you are an ESXi-only (formerly free) VMware user.

The virtual machines on the datastore are then available to import to Proxmox.

You will need to follow the import wizard steps to complete the process, and should install the VirtIO and QEMU drivers for best compatibility - this is particularly applicable to Windows that does not include these by default.

The following video demonstrates the process of importing into Proxmox.

Importing OVAs from the Cloud

Proxmox is also capable of importing VM images in the form of OVAs directly from the cloud.

Your local disk image storage needs to be set to allow disk images.

With this configured you can use the “Download from URL” option to directly download a disk image rather than downloading to a workstation and then uploading again.

With the image downloaded, you can then create a virtual machine as normal.

The following video demonstrates how to download an OVA and create a Virtual Machine from it in Proxmox.