To understand how to manipulate virtual machines on a network with multiple VMware ESXi hosts.

I've never messed around with “.OVA” or “.OVF” files before. They're what VMware uses for templates/virtual appliances. Essentially, they're pre-built machines that can be deployed without configuration. I have an OpenBSD machine on my primary VMware server that I would prefer to have on my secondary. Let me see what I can do about that!

What I will do is export the virtual machine to an OVA file for easy storage.

Cool. Now I have the OVA file that I can deploy to the other server!

With a successfully exported virtual machine, I can now deploy the OVA file to the secondary VMware server.

The creation of the VM takes awhile because I selected “Thick Provision Eager Zeroed” for the disk format. The reason I went with this option is a preference. Lazy Zeroed only “zeroes” the blocks that are immediately needed for the new VM. Eager Zeroed will “zero” the entire disk that the VM has been allocated. Theoretically, this will increase performance on the VM since ESXi won't have to “zero” blocks before writing to them. The trade-off is the fact that it takes awhile to provision the disk.

Now that the VM has been deployed to the secondary server, I can boot it up and see if everything moved over correctly!

YUS. The OpenBSD system has been successfully moved to a different server and I'm able to log back in as root and pick up where I left off when it was located on the original server!

Moving Virtual Machines/Appliances between hosts (ESXi servers) can be extremely useful. If a server was to be retired, you could move all of it's guests (Virtual Machines) to another host. If you notice too much stress on one host, you could offload some of it's duties by moving a guest to a different host! I simply did this for the sake of understanding how to do such a thing whenever a situation demands this knowledge. I love working with virtual stuff! And I can't get enough of VMware. It's way too much fun to play around with!