If you haven’t reviewed Parts 1, 2, or 3 of this series, check them out.
A lot of image-based backup systems today offer the option of restoring a server, by providing a VMDK for you to attach to a virtual machine or restoring to a host directly.
This method is sometimes used when moving between hypervisors (Hyper-V to VMWare, for instance) and you don’t want to pay for DoubleTake and or you’d prefer to convert offline (not VCenter Converter standalone).
I’ve done restores from a Datto backup, where I rebuilt the VM manually, reattaching the VMDK and it worked fine. As there are probably hundreds of backup platforms that do this in a variety of ways, I won’t go through outlining them here.
In Conclusion
For now, this concludes the series of Methods for migrating VMs to a new host without shared storage. I hope that I’ve imparted that there are a variety of viable options, but some are better fits than others for a given task. Feel tree to leave comments. If I missed your favorite method, let me know!
