This is one of those questions where there are so many ways to accomplish this it's tough to answer... so while HC3 Move powered by Double-Take is the easiest, lowest downtime and fully supported by Scale technical support way to migrate workloads onto HC3 there are other ways you can try... given you mentioned Double-Take, I assume this is a windows VM you are trying to move.

one option - us a full system backup / bare metal recovery tool. Backup the VM on xenserver, do a bare metal restore of that VM into an empty HC3 VM. Just need a tool that can restore to different hardware and "inject" the right drivers... Acronis, storagecraft, unitrends, veeam endpoint backup, barracuda, many others can do that.

Clonezilla is another option that is free - but it doesn't do anything with the driver differences inside the VM (so there are some extra steps to prepare the VM to boot using it's built in ide drivers - run mergeide.reg first ... then "clone" to a hc3 VM set to compatible instead of virtio to do the migration... you can switch to virtio later)

Lastly - there was some discussion about converting the old virtual disk (VHD?) to qcow2 and using our import feature (which is intended for exporting and importing VM's from/to HC3)... well, a little undocumented "hint" you can try is that if you simply rename the VHD file to QCOW2, our import process generally can do the disk format conversion automatically. I want to state this is not a fully tested / supported feature but it "generally" works and may be worth a try... (also you need to make sure that windows inside the VHD file has the correct drivers installed / active to be able to boot properly on HC3)

on our support portal, try searching for "Import Foreign VM or Appliances" clonezilla and mergeide.reg for more information.

Hope that helps point you in the right direction.

(note: I couldn't find a way to upload docs here and the URL's for them are behind login)

Hey that's me - the product manager on the video<g> ... and that was a couple years ago. Things do change! - I was also part of the webinar we did with workspot yesterday (I believe there is a recording available as here as well http://bit.ly/ScaleWorkspotWebinarRecording)

So with our recent introduction of HC3 nodes with integrated flash tiering (and corresponding larger CPU and RAM footprint) - running a greater number of virtual desktops on HC3 is now possible. In addition - new companies like Workspot have have greatly simplified virtual desktop and application delivery to a point where you can get it set up and be logging in in under an hour ...

This isn't official Scale marketing but here is a video I posted of workspot provisioning 250 win7 desktops on a 3 node HC4150 cluster (and honestly there is room for many more on that system)

With Scale HC3 plus workspot - all of your VM's run on your HC3 infrastructure but the workspot control center runs in the cloud so there is no complex software to install, manage or update on your site and new functionality can be added regularly - when users connect however they connect directly from their endpoint (ipad, laptop, thin client) to the VM running on the HC3 system.

Let me know if there are any other questions I can answer

Youtube Video

@Kelly may be worth a call / online chat or email with [email protected] so they can look at the logs...

are you sure you have the full share and folder path specified? from your screen shot it looks like something may be missing... normally it should be somthing like smb://server/share/folder/

(in my screen below the share is /exports and the folder I'm importing from is /EmptyImportShell which I created doing a VM export to the /exports share previously ... in that /EmptyImportshell folder is a file called EmptyImportShell.xml which has all the metadata about the VM and one qcow2 file which in this case happens to be 93dfb769-5ccd-49af-90c6-dd464b03536d.qcow2 ... but it's a guid so your file name will be different)

But as a test, if you haven't already can you create a small "template" VM with 1 small virtual disk (don't even have to boot it) and try to export it to that same server / share / credentials to validate that the export works ... and that you can import it back in as a test.

If you can export that empty shell and then test import it back ... that should at least confirm all the permissions, paths, etc. are correct... then you can even use that empty template to replace the virtual disk file with the virtual disk you want to import ... just replace it but keep the name and extension the same and give it a go.

@Kelly yeah the HC3 Move (powered by Double-Take) is certainly easier and more direct...

if the xenserver export virtual disk file is a VHD file, you can probably skip converting it to qcow2 but simply renaming the file to match the guid of the exported empty qcow2 file (so it will still be named <guid>.qcow2 even though it's actually your VHD file.) Our import is actually using the qemu-img convert tool which will automagically detect that it's really a VHD format and do the conversion at the same time it imports it to save that extra step. (and also you can use that same "import shell" over and over... just keep replacing the guid.qcow2 file with the one you want to import)

@dafyre currently we do not ... but as above, things can change based on customer demand, technology changes, etc.

@John-Nicholson fwiw they are SM863

@Kelly yeah the HC3 Move (powered by Double-Take) is certainly easier and more direct...

if the xenserver export virtual disk file is a VHD file, you can probably skip converting it to qcow2 but simply renaming the file to match the guid of the exported empty qcow2 file (so it will still be named <guid>.qcow2 even though it's actually your VHD file.) Our import is actually using the qemu-img convert tool which will automagically detect that it's really a VHD format and do the conversion at the same time it imports it to save that extra step. (and also you can use that same "import shell" over and over... just keep replacing the guid.qcow2 file with the one you want to import)

@Kelly may be worth a call / online chat or email with [email protected] so they can look at the logs...

are you sure you have the full share and folder path specified? from your screen shot it looks like something may be missing... normally it should be somthing like smb://server/share/folder/

(in my screen below the share is /exports and the folder I'm importing from is /EmptyImportShell which I created doing a VM export to the /exports share previously ... in that /EmptyImportshell folder is a file called EmptyImportShell.xml which has all the metadata about the VM and one qcow2 file which in this case happens to be 93dfb769-5ccd-49af-90c6-dd464b03536d.qcow2 ... but it's a guid so your file name will be different)

But as a test, if you haven't already can you create a small "template" VM with 1 small virtual disk (don't even have to boot it) and try to export it to that same server / share / credentials to validate that the export works ... and that you can import it back in as a test.

If you can export that empty shell and then test import it back ... that should at least confirm all the permissions, paths, etc. are correct... then you can even use that empty template to replace the virtual disk file with the virtual disk you want to import ... just replace it but keep the name and extension the same and give it a go.

This is one of those questions where there are so many ways to accomplish this it's tough to answer... so while HC3 Move powered by Double-Take is the easiest, lowest downtime and fully supported by Scale technical support way to migrate workloads onto HC3 there are other ways you can try... given you mentioned Double-Take, I assume this is a windows VM you are trying to move.

one option - us a full system backup / bare metal recovery tool. Backup the VM on xenserver, do a bare metal restore of that VM into an empty HC3 VM. Just need a tool that can restore to different hardware and "inject" the right drivers... Acronis, storagecraft, unitrends, veeam endpoint backup, barracuda, many others can do that.

Clonezilla is another option that is free - but it doesn't do anything with the driver differences inside the VM (so there are some extra steps to prepare the VM to boot using it's built in ide drivers - run mergeide.reg first ... then "clone" to a hc3 VM set to compatible instead of virtio to do the migration... you can switch to virtio later)

Lastly - there was some discussion about converting the old virtual disk (VHD?) to qcow2 and using our import feature (which is intended for exporting and importing VM's from/to HC3)... well, a little undocumented "hint" you can try is that if you simply rename the VHD file to QCOW2, our import process generally can do the disk format conversion automatically. I want to state this is not a fully tested / supported feature but it "generally" works and may be worth a try... (also you need to make sure that windows inside the VHD file has the correct drivers installed / active to be able to boot properly on HC3)

on our support portal, try searching for "Import Foreign VM or Appliances" clonezilla and mergeide.reg for more information.

Hope that helps point you in the right direction.

(note: I couldn't find a way to upload docs here and the URL's for them are behind login)

@dafyre currently we do not ... but as above, things can change based on customer demand, technology changes, etc.

Hey that's me - the product manager on the video<g> ... and that was a couple years ago. Things do change! - I was also part of the webinar we did with workspot yesterday (I believe there is a recording available as here as well http://bit.ly/ScaleWorkspotWebinarRecording)

So with our recent introduction of HC3 nodes with integrated flash tiering (and corresponding larger CPU and RAM footprint) - running a greater number of virtual desktops on HC3 is now possible. In addition - new companies like Workspot have have greatly simplified virtual desktop and application delivery to a point where you can get it set up and be logging in in under an hour ...

This isn't official Scale marketing but here is a video I posted of workspot provisioning 250 win7 desktops on a 3 node HC4150 cluster (and honestly there is room for many more on that system)

With Scale HC3 plus workspot - all of your VM's run on your HC3 infrastructure but the workspot control center runs in the cloud so there is no complex software to install, manage or update on your site and new functionality can be added regularly - when users connect however they connect directly from their endpoint (ipad, laptop, thin client) to the VM running on the HC3 system.

Let me know if there are any other questions I can answer

Youtube Video