What's the best way to migrate a Debian installation to ESXi? I have a Debian web server running on software RAID1 and ideally, I'd like to keep the raid config, provided that it would still make sense to have a raid1 config for a VM. I have seen lot's suggest using vCenter converter, but from my understanding, you cannot use it to install and migrate to ESXi on the same machine. I do have another machine running ESXi, however, it doesn't have the storage to support the data for the webserver, nor would it have the memory required to support it and a heavily used windows domain controller.
The only options I see available is to:
go get another hard drive, transfer the content of the webserver to it then format the original drives, install ESXi, reinstall Debian onto a VM, reinstall and reconfigure the webserver, and then transfer the data to the newly created VM.
connect a 3rd drive; install the hypervisor onto it and create the VM to boot off the other two drives (but I am not sure it can work).
I don't have a problem with the first option, provided there's no other way, and it seems like there should be an easier way to do this, plus I have a lot of modified configuration files in here, and finding all of them to back them up would take more time than I have.
The second option seems the easiest, but I have a gut feeling it won't work.
Is there any other way to achieve this? using another system to temporarily hold the data really isn't an option for me.