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Overview

Discovery walks the inventory of a registered VMware environment and records every candidate virtual machine along with its disks, network adapters, and guest metadata. Discovery is safe to re-run at any time — it is read-only against the source and does not alter the running VMs.
Prerequisites
  • A registered VMware environment with status Connected
  • The vSphere account used for registration must have read access to the VMs, hosts, and datastores you plan to discover

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Run Discovery

Open the Discover tab

Navigate to Migration → Discover and select the VMware environment from the source dropdown.

Choose a scope

Optionally narrow discovery by datacenter, cluster, or folder. Leaving the scope empty inventories every reachable VM in the environment.

Start the scan

Click Discover. nxtMove opens a vSphere API session, walks the inventory through a container view, and normalizes each VM into a platform-neutral record.Progress is shown live — hosts walked, VMs counted, and the currently inspected object.

Review the inventory

When the scan completes, the inventory table lists every discovered VM with its key attributes. Templates are excluded by default.
Inventory shows the expected VM count and each row has a valid OS, disk, and NIC summary.

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What nxtMove Discovers

For every VM, nxtMove records the following attributes and makes them available throughout the Migration panel:
Guest hostname and IP addresses come from VMware Tools. If tools are not installed on a source VM, the discovery record still contains all hypervisor attributes — it has no guest-level fields. This is not a migration blocker.

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Inventory Columns

The Discover inventory table exposes the most important fields for triage and selection: Use the column filters to narrow the list — for example, show only powered-off Windows VMs under 100 GB for an initial cold-migration wave.

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Re-running Discovery

Discovery is idempotent. Re-running it refreshes the inventory cache and reflects any changes made in the source:
  • VMs added, deleted, renamed, or moved between clusters
  • Disk layouts changed on the source side
  • Power-state transitions since the last scan
Re-running discovery does not affect in-progress migration jobs. Warm migrations keep their original baseline — they do not pick up new disks that appear after the job started. Add new disks by submitting a new job.

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Next Steps

Preflight Assessment

Score each workload for compatibility before migrating

Cold Migration

Migrate powered-off VMs in a single pass

Warm Migration

Migrate running VMs with incremental sync