Migrating Virtualized to bare metal

[Frozennova]

I'd like to move away from esxi for various reasons and would rather not go for a fresh install and reconfigure and install all the various packages etc I need.


Would I be making a huge mistake if I was to use something like clonezilla to clone from the Vm's virtual disk to a physical disk then removing the Vmware guest tools?

Would it also be a case of then booting a live cd to expand from the current 16gb vmdk to fill the 60gb SSD I would be cloning to

edit: this will also free up a 120gb SSD to go in my main machine while the 60gb in my main machine is moved to the server so the process will actually be

clone main system to spare drive.
clone vmdk to 60gb SSD removed from main system
clone main machine from spare drive to 120gb SSD and expand partition

This means that my esxi datastore will still be in tact should I encounter any problems with the server after cloning

also worth noting I won't be using RDMs as I have a hba passed through to the server so the 60 SSD will be connected to that

 

[cokecan]

While my preference would usually be a clean install we did actually end up doing this with one of our ESXi VM's using clonezilla.

I had my reservations but actually it worked fine. Once we booted the bare metal machine up Windows installed all the necessary drivers and all was well. The newer versions of Windows (2008/2012/R2/W7/W8/W8.1 etc) really are much more forgiving with extreme hardware changes like this than the likes of 2003/XP.

That machine has been running on bare metal for about 6 months now with no issue

 

[Frozennova]

Forgot to mention the vm in question is Debian rather than Windows

 

[Frozennova]

Well so far so good.

Debian VM cloned to a spare drive with CloneZilla, boots happily with no errors or kernel panics.

Now cloning my 60GB Kingston over to the 128GB MX100 to go in my main rig then it's back to CloneZilla to clone from the spare drive to the Kingston V300 to go into the server