Over the years, organizations have steadily adopted hypervisors like VMware, Hyper-V, OpenShift and Oracle Linux VM to manage their virtual environments. Recently, Proxmox has emerged as a compelling alternative, gaining traction as a lightweight, cost-effective, and robust platform designed to empower IT teams with advanced capabilities.
Traditionally, critical workloads have been hosted on tier-1 hypervisors, while other hypervisors were reserved for non-critical VMs. This paradigm is shifting, with Proxmox now being recognized as a capable primary alternative for managing both critical and non-critical workloads.
Proxmox combines simplicity with robust capabilities, making it the preferred choice for organizations worldwide. Whether you're migrating thousands of virtual machines or managing hybrid workloads, Proxmox delivers unmatched flexibility and efficiency. Its open-source nature eliminates licensing costs, while its unified management interface simplifies operations.
The Big Question: How Quickly Can You Migrate to Proxmox?
The growing popularity of Proxmox raises an important question for IT teams: how fast can organizations transition to this platform?
With tools like the NetApp Shift Toolkit and ONTAP storage, the migration process becomes faster and more streamlined than ever. Organizations have successfully migrated thousands of VMs in record time, leveraging the toolkit’s zero-copy mechanisms and efficient workflows.
So, what about migrating 2,500 VMs in just two weeks, is that even achievable? With the right strategy and tools, it absolutely is. NetApp’s Shift Toolkit has already enabled customers to execute migrations at this scale, proving that large-scale transitions can be both fast and predictable.
How does it work:
The process is simple and incredibly efficient:
- Install the Shift Toolkit: With just five simple clicks, you can set up the toolkit.
- Add Source and Destination Sites: Define the migration endpoints.
- Configure Resource Groups: Group the VMs to be migrated. Shift Toolkit recommends grouping 200 VMs in a single blueprint. This can be a single resource group of 200 VMs or divided into smaller groups, such as four groups of 50 VMs each.
- Create the Blueprint: Define the migration plan with resource groups (RGs).
Note: As a prerequisite, make sure an NFS v3 datastore is mounted on the vCenter. The same datastore volume should include a qtree configured with a UNIX security style for storing qcow2 files and it must also be mounted to Proxmox as a storage pool.
Once the preparation is complete, gracefully shut down the VMs in the migration wave and trigger the Migrate option for the blueprint. Once the workflow starts, Shift toolkit will connect to vCenter and create a VM snapshot and then a volume snapshot of the NFS v3 volume and use it for cloning purposes and converts the VMDK to qcow2 file in the designated qtree. The qcow2 files are placed in the individual VM folders under /etc/pve/<NFS storage pool>/images/VM <ID>. The converted qcow2 files are used to create the VMs.
All of these will happen in ~ 5 mins as the conversion process is simple block pointer changes with no data copy making Shift toolkit the preferred toolkit for 1000s of customers.
Here is the workflow:
Behind the Scenes
When the workflow starts, the Shift Toolkit connects to vCenter and performs the following steps:
Stage 1: Prepare VM (Source / VMware)
- Inject Drivers: Run in-guest scripts on each VMware VM to inject VirtIO drivers, ensuring they are boot-safe on Proxmox.
Stage 2: Migrate — Source Side (VMware + ONTAP)
- Remove VMware Snapshots: Remove any existing VMware snapshots against the VMs.
- Take VMware Snapshot: Create a point-in-time VMware snapshot.
- ONTAP Snapshot: Take an ONTAP volume snapshot to ensure disks can be read from a stable, immutable copy.
Stage 3: Migrate — Target Side (Proxmox + ONTAP)
- Reserve VMID: Reserve a unique Proxmox VMID for every VM within the plan.
- Create VM in Proxmox: Use the VMID, network, cluster, and storage mappings to create the VM in Proxmox.
- Convert VMDK to QCOW2/RAW: Convert each VMDK to QCOW2 (or RAW) directly from the ONTAP snapshot and write it to the mapped Proxmox NFS storage pool.
- Attach Disks: Attach all converted disks in the correct SCSI order to the new VM and power it on.
Why Is It So Fast?
All of this happens in minutes per VM because the conversion process involves simple block pointer changes rather than a full data copy. This zero-copy mechanism makes the Shift Toolkit the preferred choice for thousands of customers seeking lightning-fast migrations.
Want to Learn More?
For more information and to leverage the same functionality as other customers who increased their migration speeds, follow the detailed documentation here.
Here is the video that covers the process in detail.
