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3.3.2.6. Converting a VMware ESX Virtual Machine

Uninstall VMware Tools prior to conversion

When converting a Windows virtual machine from VMware ESX, ensure that VMware Tools is not installed on the virtual machine. The VMware Tools must be uninstalled prior to the conversion process. If a virtual machine is converted with the VMware Tools installed, it will not function correctly.
Ensure that the virtual machine is stopped prior to running the v2v process.
To convert the virtual machine, run:
virt-v2v -ic esx://esx.example.com/ -o rhev -os storage.example.com:/exportdomain --network rhevm vm-name
Where storage.example.com:/exportdomain is the export storage domain, rhevm is the locally managed network to connect the converted virtual machine's network to, and vm-name is the name of the virtual machine. You may also use the --bridge parameter to connect to a local network bridge, or specify multiple mappings in /etc/virt-v2v.conf.
Authenticating to the ESX server
Connecting to the ESX server will require authentication. virt-v2v supports password authentication when connecting to ESX. It reads passwords from $HOME/.netrc. The format of this file is described in netrc(5). An example entry is:
machine esx.example.com login root password s3cr3t

.netrc permissions

The .netrc file must have a permission mask of 0600 to be read correctly by virt-v2v
Connecting to an ESX server with an invalid certificate
In non-production environments, the ESX server may have a non-valid certificate, for example a self-signed certificate. In this case, certificate checking can be explicitly disabled by adding '?no_verify=1' to the connection URI as shown below:
... -ic esx://esx.example.com/?no_verify=1 ...