Moving VMWARE VM to Proxmox: The steps to follow

first download the OVFtool from VMARE and make sure you put the ‘bundle’  file on your Proxmox host. I used: VMware-ovftool-4.4.0-15722219-lin.x86_64.bundle

Make sure  sure the prerequisites of ovftool are present on the proxmox host
apt install libncursesw5

This file could be needed (I saw somewhere that someone had an error missing this dependency), so I installed it.

than make sure the VMWARE-ovftool can be executed so chmod it to ie. 755

install it with ./VMWARE-ovftool-xxxx
after the installation is finished it will tell you that it has been installed correctly

Than follow the following steps:

  1. ovftool vi:root@[vmware-machine]/[name-of-vm] .
    This will download the VM onto your Proxmox host
  2. qm importovf 200 [name-of-vm].ovf local-zfs
    this will convert your VM to Proxmox and put it on (in my case) local-zfs
    when ready you need to add a network card to the hardware in Proxmox, as this is not transferred from VMWARE
  3. Add the vmxnet3 driver for network in Proxmox
    boot the machine and login.

check the ensXX where XX can be different from VMWARE, so change it (easy to be seen with the command ‘ ip address ‘

change it to the correct new number in the file: /etc/networking/interface
shutdown machine again and reboot

VM is being converted from VMWARE to Proxmox

NB. I used Proxmox 6.2-10 with their ISO on a HP Gen8 MicroServer (Community Edition)