Moving large (6TB) thin provisioned VM

[GregChristopher]

I have a large VM with thin provisioning- up to 6TB space available. 7TB storage drive- no vsan, no san.

I can't for the life of me cold migrate it. I tried:
-Move compute and storage (normal transfer speed, drastic slowdown, then fails)
-Scpy from one HV to the other- (corrupts -flat vmdk file at destination/scpy fails)
-SFTP Down then back UP to second HV (succeeds but VM can't launch)
-Tarring vm folder with perms using tar cpf (it keeps tarring creating a tar file that exceeds the size of the directory until ctrl-c)

The original VM is working when I launch it, and reporting no problems. But just can't get it over to other machine. Unfortunately no vSAN or othe SAN setup quite yet. So guessing largely untested.

The busybox tar seems to work with smaller folders predictably. There may be something about the way esx treats sparseimages which causes things like "ls -l" to list the full size while "ls -lisa" represents the actual space... So I sort of understand how this could happen.

Completely at a loss here.

[GregChristopher]

Forgot the other things I tried but did not mention:
-Right click on folder in storage view on virtual center and download (fails, crashing browser)
-Shrinking image: vmware converter deprecated; vmware-toolbox-cmd has shrink function removed but gaslights you with "you are either running an older version of the product or too many communication channels are open". Fact: Security team made them remove the feature.

[a_p_]

Please take a look at https://williamlam.com/2012/06/how-to-copy-vms-directly-between-esxi.html to see whether this is something that can help.

André

[GregChristopher]

Wow great gem from the past. I will try this.

Amazing how many ways you could do this and how many fail in certain situations. I have at least 5 failure cases.
I also am recognizing that moving to a first-class backup system is now even more useful as (seemingly obvious) this was mentioned in the thread for the article. Thank you @a_p_ !