I often need to move a VM from one VMware server to another. I don’t have any of the licensed feature like Vmotion. So I use SSH (scp) to transfer my virtual machine. Then I simply need to register the new VM. In VMware ESX 3.5, when moving or copying a virtual machine I used vmware-cmd to register the new virtual machine. To my surprise, in VMware ESXi, the command line features have been removed, vmware-cmd does not exist.

I have two options.

First, Install the “Remote Command Line Tools” on a linux host and run your vmware-cmd command remotely.

Vmware-cmd –H hostname_of_ESXi –s register /vmfs/volumes/datastorename/vm-dir/vm.vmx

Second, easiest one, use the datastore browser. In your vSphere Client, under Configuration / Storage. Right click on your datastore and choose “Browse Datastore”, browse to your vm.vmx, right click on it and there is an option “Add to inventory”.

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