My currrent ESXi 4.0.0 system runs from an SD card and has some VMs set up on two 1 TB drives running in a Raid level 1 configuration on a Dell PowerEdge R710. I've been asked to make the system use a hard disk in place of the SD card.
I've tried to copy the entire SD card to a third hard drive (trying both dd from an Ubuntu live disc or Clonezilla, which gave the same results). With the hard disk configured in the Raid controller as Raid level 0, ESXi loads and starts to boot up. About 40% of the way in, the error message "Failed to find boot partition" is displayed.
Taking another route, a fresh install from a free VMware trial disc doesn't seem to have that error but I do have to reconfigure everything. Not only do I get the notification that I'm on a trial license, but the existing VMs aren't visible when I connect via the client. Is there some way to import them that isn't readily apparent to a novice user?
How do I run the system from a hard disk rather than the SD card, keeping my existing VMs as unchanged as possible?
Answer
You won't be able to move to running off of an SD card to the disk arrangement you've described without some disruption to the virtual machines presently on disk. May I ask why you're no longer interested in using the SD for ESXi? Many people seem to be moving in the direction of using SD cards/USB keys instead of dedicated disks for VMWare.
The fresh installation approach should allow you to import the existing datastore containing your VMs. Going to: Configuration -> Storage -> Add Storage within the vSphere client should allow you to mount the old VMFS volume from the RAID 1 pair.
Following that, you will need to browse the datastore and reimport your virtual machines by adding them into your VM inventory.
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