Hello all - I hoping there is a simple answer to my problem (don't we all!)
We are building one hundred 7th Gen i3 Intel NUCs each with a 525GB SSD. I have manually installed ESXi 6.5U1, configured it and used VMWare Converter to transfer over the 11 virtual images that will be stored on the SSD (they aren't all run at the same time).
I am looking for the fastest way to duplicate NUC to another NUC, without manually going through the same process.
I thought I found a solid solution by using Ubuntu and the DD command to clone the partitions. Using a Skull Candy NUC (which has two M2 SSD slots), I installed the Source SSD in Slot 0 and the Destination SSD in Slot 1. I booted the Skull Candy NUC with a USB flash drive with Ubuntu on it. I then used sfdisk to recreate the partitions and then a series of dd commands to copy each of the 8 partitions. I inserted the cloned SSD into a new 7th gen NUC, and it booted up just fine. While the partitions are all there, the Datastore is not. I suspect it is because the unique name of the Destination SSD is different, resulting in a different Path to it. So my 11 virtual machines are all listed as Invalid because they are pointing to a Volume that doesn't exist.
Is there an easy way to fix this? While I have worked with VMWare for years, it has mostly been on simple test systems, so I am venturing into unchartered territory here. I found a number of complex KB articles and posts discussing repartitioning drives to recover missing datastores, but I think my partitions are ok... seems like a misnamed pointer or something similar.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions...