4

I acquired a VMWare image, but everything in the folder was GZipped, IE Each individual file. Now when I attempt to uncompressed the images in order to put onto an ESX machine I run out of space(They were initially >80Gb compressed to 14Gb).

Does anyone know of a decent way to import this onto an ESX machine without having to decompress the files myself?

1
  • Do you have any room on a local desktop system to uncompress the files and then upload the full-size images to the ESXi server?
    – ewwhite
    Nov 12, 2010 at 19:06

5 Answers 5

1

Uncompress the gzip'd file onto a Windows desktop machine, and use vmware converter to shrink the disks, or basically get rid of the zero'd space at the end (which is why you are getting such a high compression rate.

0

Assuming the .gz file is on another machine, you could try using gzip and piping it to netcat. Not sure how easy it is to get netcat running on esxi though.

If you've not got room locally, you could copy the file to the esxi server, SSH in, and then unzip it there?

1
  • 1
    netcat works on esxi, I've used it many times. Nov 17, 2010 at 17:30
0

If I understand what you are asking, you want to run the VM without decompressing the files. This is not possible. Depending on if the VM actually is using 80 GB of data, you man however be able to move them to another system that has enough space, decompress them there, then import them into ESXi using the VMware converter (or ovftool), selecting "thin disk" as a deployment option so they don't take up the entire size of the virtual disk issued to them, but there might actually be 80GB of data in the disk, in which case this wouldn't get you anywhere.

0

To keep it easy you could expand the machine on a desktop and start it. Check the hd size and add a new disk, smaller. Then use norton ghost or anything similar to clone the disk and then (after trying it) erase the original one just like you'd do with a physical pc.

0

Um, either way this isn't going to work. If you can't uncompress the images onto your filesystem then there is no way you'll be able to import them into ESXi once you do uncompress them. Am I missing something?

2
  • If the disk is a "Thick" disk, i.e. it has been pre-allocated, and it is mostly empty, then he can convert it to "thin" prior to putting it on the ESXi box, so it won't take up all his space (although it will shut off when he runs out of space, but that is another issue). Nov 17, 2010 at 18:20
  • agreed, but i think his issue will come down to whether he has enough disk space to run the VMs.
    – sdot257
    Nov 17, 2010 at 18:39

You must log in to answer this question.