I'm running the free version of ESXi 5 and have created an VM that is configured with software for our project. I want to share this VM with other team members, some of whom are at other locations and have slow network connections. I'd like to package up the VM into a reasonably sized file or set of files that I could ftp (or put on DVD for folks in slow network areas) that they could then import into their ESXi hosts. The VM has a 60GB disk that is provisioned using the "thin" option so it only contains 6 or 7 GB of actual data right now. Is there some way to export this image to a file or set of files that can be imported to another persons ESXI host? Previously when I used VM Player we could do this by tarring up the files in the VM directory and copying them to the new machine. With the ESXi datastore, I'm not sure something like this can be done. I have used vCenter Converter to convert ESXi VM Infrastructure format to VM Player format (and vice versa) but it is extremely slow. I suspect I could point the Source at my ESXi host and the Destination at a co-workers ESXi host and run a "conversion" to transfer the files, but I think this would be very slow and would be impractical for some "slow-network" folks. I tried browsing the datastore with vSphere Client and i see upload/download options but when I tried to download a VM directory it just hung. I enabled ssh on my ESXi server and i found the datastore under /vmfs/volumes and when I look in the folder that contains my VM, it has a myvmname-flat.vmdk file that is 60 GB in size so if I tar up the contents of this folder to move elsewhere it will be huge.
Can anyone suggest a solution? Would the licensed version of ESXi offer better alternatives?