Add a New Virtual Machine to Inventory from a Datastore

 

 

By Joe Piggee

If you present new storage to vSphere that already has VM’s stored on it, you can add them to inventory so you can power them on, manage them etc by following these steps.

1. Open the vSphere/VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client and log in with appropriate credentials.
2. If connecting to vCenter Server, click on the desired host.
3. Click the Configuration tab.
4. Click Storage.
5. Right-click on the appropriate datastore and click Browse Datastore.
6. Navigate to the folder named after the virtual machine, and locate the <virtual machine>.vmx file.
7. Right-click the .vmx file and click Add to inventory. The Add to Inventory wizard opens.
   continue to follow the wizard to add the virtual machine.

If the device is something like an external USB drive, prior to completing the steps above complete the following:

If you have some shared storage, install vCenter 5.1, then connect the External hard drive to the PC you are working from(the one you have the vSphere client installed on) browse to the appropriate datastore, and upload the VM's to the shared storage, or to the local datastore that the ESXi host has. Then complete the steps needed to import the discovered VM's listed above.