The worst has happened. That sexy ESX host that you spent ages building and perfecting went south. For some reason, the raid you built was corrupt, and now you’ve re-installed ESX. With luck you had your VM’s on some shared storage (SAN, iSCSI, NFS). Or… You’ve just SCP’d over a metric boat load of VM images from a prior install, say from dev/test to production.
In either of these situations you will find yourself needing to import your VM’s from your datastore. This is a fairly simple process.
By Hand
So because that is nearly impossible to read, here are the steps:
- Select your host
- Select your datastore
- Right click the datastore
- Click browse
- Select the folder containing the VM
- Select the VMX file
- Right click “Add to Inventory”
- Select a Host & Resource Pool
- Name it
- Finished
Easy enough? Originally I was looking for a way to do this in PowerShell, but it is not as straightforward as it would seem. I will continue looking, so stay tuned for that in a future post.