pkg install vmdktool

[RegularJoe]

Hi All,

How do I get the repo or the files to install? I have tested on TrueOS and the package is there. I need to be able to plug a SATA disk into my FreeNAS 11 box and convert a physical disk to VMDK for VMware ESXi. I need just one command and I do not want to make a jail or vm for one command. The only command I want to type in is "pkg install vmdktool" and be able to use that FreeBSD tool. If I am in a guest VM or jail I am not sure I would have physical access to convert a disk to an image anyway.

I am sure I do not want to use Linux or Windows to convert a physical disk to an img or vmdk....

Thanks,
Joe

 

[Ericloewe]

You cannot install anything on the base OS. You'd have to do it in a jail.

One possible way of doing so would be to dd the disk into a file accessible by the jail and operate on that.

 

[Chris Moore]

I am sure I do not want to use Linux or Windows to convert a physical disk to an img or vmdk....

Why? You say you already tried it under TrueOS. Why not just make the VMDK under TrueOS and copy it to the FreeNAS system?

 

[RegularJoe]

Why? You say you already tried it under TrueOS. Why not just make the VMDK under TrueOS and copy it to the FreeNAS system?

If I dd the disk I get every block and out of a 4tb drive if only 15gb is used I get to wait a day for the dd to finish...

It seems there are quite a few things in TrueOS that are annoying and do not work the way I would expect. FreeNAS I know how to setup VLANs, LACP and NFS shares via the GUI. I can do it on Linux and I know I can do it via WebMin on Linux. For this one time migration I would like to use my mouse. I might have to just do it on Windows.

I was hoping I could take the disk and plug it into a FreeNAS box and get a thin provisioned VMDK for the NFS server. At that point the bottleneck would be the SATA interface or the speed of the single disk I am converting to a VMDK for VMware running on FreeNAS via NFS.

Eventually the Linux and FreeBSD devs have to say the user(customer) is number 1 and right. Let them trash it like a Windows box. If this were an iXsystems TrueNAS I would be ok with the answer NO.

Might as well just say "Let them eat cake!"

 

[RegularJoe]

You cannot install anything on the base OS. You'd have to do it in a jail.

One possible way of doing so would be to dd the disk into a file accessible by the jail and operate on that.

Thanks but that means I have to copy(wait) on every block on the mechanical SATA source I am trying to make an image of.

Maybe I just need a 10 gig network so that I can connect that way rather than over the SATA bus. I would like to make this migration tonight though. LOL

 

[Ericloewe]

Thanks but that means I have to copy(wait) on every block on the mechanical SATA source I am trying to make an image of.

You're never going to magically get around that, unless the disk was formatted in a weird way that is conducive to the process.

 

[RegularJoe]

that is what I did, the same ZFS volume was impoted into TrueOS and FreeNAS. klunky but it did work. a 750 gig MacOS X server disk became a 409gig .vmdk file.