

I do not envy VMware, in particular, because they gleefully introduced the UNMAP stuff in 5.0 thinking that it was the bee's knees, followed by an UNMAPocalypse and nearly immediate advice to disable it as it was crushing SAN arrays built by major vendors with hundreds of engineers, so work is competing favorably in a complex, rarefied arena against vendors with much larger engineering departments, and at a minimum everyone should buy him a beer. I remain firmly in the old-timers camp of building thin-provisioned VM's that do not do a lot of unnecessary writes, do a fsck_ffs -Z for all filesystems on newly built systems or during major maintenance, and then migrate storage or run vmkfstools -K as a secondary step to "squeeze the water out of the sponge." Like most tech, the UNMAP stuff is exciting but may underdeliver somewhat, and probably needs several more years to mature and reach that point of working as well as you might expect. Some debugging and other useful information in this bug report: Overall, I believe it should generally work, as some significant effort was put in by on the new kernel iSCSI and ZVOL's to make UNMAP work, but because we're discussing features that have significant complexity at each level (guest, hypervisor, NAS) it appears that this doesn't always work as well as you might expect. The new HomeLab has the following components. The command below is what we’ll use to start the update.
#COPY A VM ESXI 6.5 UPDATE#
Now that we have the profile list, we need to update the software profile using the name we just copied to a notepad. No need to copy files around, rename files, etc. It will do P2V and V2V conversions, quite easily. Last, but not least, the power consumption was at 200W. Copy the ESXi-6.5.0-20170404001-standard to a notepad since we’ll use it with our next command. Point it to your existing ESXi server, select the VM you want to clone, tell it to create it on the same (or different ESXi server), verify config of the new VM, and let if fly.
#COPY A VM ESXI 6.5 UPGRADE#
VMWare ESXi was version 6.5, but I could not upgrade to version 6.7 because the network card was not in the list of supported NICs and so the upgrade failed. I'm not using ESXi 6.5 so I can't say from experience. HomeLab Copy VM from one ESXi host to another.

#COPY A VM ESXI 6.5 HOW TO#
I did lots of googling and forum searches and tried many things without success so if anyone could put together a simple step-by-step "How To" on how to accomplish this, I would be grateful! Should the VMWare server go up in flames, I want to be able to easily recover the backed up VMs from the FreeNAS to another VMWare server.

EFI secure boot is only available on vSphere 6.5 and higher. I want to regularly (daily) backup the two Windows VMs hosted on the VMWare server (10.0.0.205) to the FreeNAS (10.0.0.100) for system recovery. This alternate example details how to clone a VM from a template that came from an OVF/OVA. hosts two Windows Server VMs (approx 400GB disk space used) The issue I'm trying to figure out is how do I backup a Windows VM hosted on a separate VMWare ESXi 6.5 server to the FreeNAS? This is a non-production environment, just a test lab I use to play. I have not used FreeNAS before but have installed and configured it as best I can.
