Restoring a VM from a tarball.

[geelsu]

I am not having any luck searching for a thread that covers restoring from a tarball.  If there is one could someone point me to that.  However, before doing so would you kindly review what I face in the below message?  Thanks.

Using: VMWare vCenter Server, 5.0.0

Details:  I have absolutely no experience with VMWare or the vSphere other than what has been thrown upon me and learned in the last few days.  I need to move a bunch of VMs to an archive for storage.  In doing that I wanted to write out the restore procedure of a VM from a tarball in a document.  And this is a worse case senario where a future VMWare enclave will or may exist but know nothing about the VM in the tarball.   So I actually found the physical location of the VM files at a mounted directory off the NetApp at /data/esx/virtual1_at3.  Under here are the directories for a bunch of VMs.  I found a VM that I confirmed with others that was not used for anything, then went to the physical location, tar'ed up the directory and then used Delete from Disk in vSphere to remove it.  I found I could do that with Home -> Inventory -> Hosts and Clusters.

So now I want to bring this tarball back into my enclave as a practice step and to help me write the procedures.  I can't find any sort of Restore from Archive or Import a VM and such.  Is this possible?  Since I am in test mode and since I have other unused VMs I can test with perhaps there is a better way to prepare for such a worse case senario.  Any help will be greatly appreciated.  Please remember, I know little about this so each detail is important.  Experienced users often perform steps between steps that they don't even think about.  :smileyhappy:

[sparrowangelste]

so you have a vm that is tar'd and you want to untar it and restore it?

you could just unzip it and upload the vm to a datastore.

then import the vm from the datastore

[geelsu]

Umm, I sort of have found that.  My only problem is the tarball is on a linux server and when I click the menu items it brings up the standard windows type interface to browse with. I'll have to get the file to a Windows shared drive or setup some sort of Samba file system perhaps.

[mcowger]

If you wanted to do this, tar is not quite the best choice, if only (because as you've noticed) vCenter has no native understanding of it.

Better would be to go to the File menu in vCenter and choose 'Export OVF Template'.  This will export the entire VM as a file that can be used on almost any standard VM system, incluidng Hyper-V, Xen and VMware vCenter or Workstation.  To reimport, just go back to the file menu and choose 'Deploy OVF Template'.

[geelsu]

Thanks MC.

I have the vSphere client only ... we'll that is all I have found so far.  If I select a powered off system I did find File -> Export -> Export OVF Template.  I will try that.  Again, like I answered the other responder to this thread, I brings up the standard Windows type interface for browsing around.  I will see if I can establish a link between the Windows and Linux worlds so I can save the file on a Linux box.

[mcowger]

vSphere client works fine too - menu is in the same location.  With OVF, no need for Linux or tarballs.

[geelsu]

OK MC. I have an export going now.  Cross your fingers.  :smileyhappy:

[geelsu]

I guess I should explain, that I am setting perhaps 3 miles from the actual NetApps and such where VMWare is running.  I have only the vSphere client.  Perhaps if I can get the permission to go into the network closet over there I might have other tools or options.