I am not having any luck searching for a thread that covers restoring from a tarball. If there is one could someone point me to that. However, before doing so would you kindly review what I face in the below message? Thanks.
Using: VMWare vCenter Server, 5.0.0
Details: I have absolutely no experience with VMWare or the vSphere other than what has been thrown upon me and learned in the last few days. I need to move a bunch of VMs to an archive for storage. In doing that I wanted to write out the restore procedure of a VM from a tarball in a document. And this is a worse case senario where a future VMWare enclave will or may exist but know nothing about the VM in the tarball. So I actually found the physical location of the VM files at a mounted directory off the NetApp at /data/esx/virtual1_at3. Under here are the directories for a bunch of VMs. I found a VM that I confirmed with others that was not used for anything, then went to the physical location, tar'ed up the directory and then used Delete from Disk in vSphere to remove it. I found I could do that with Home -> Inventory -> Hosts and Clusters.
So now I want to bring this tarball back into my enclave as a practice step and to help me write the procedures. I can't find any sort of Restore from Archive or Import a VM and such. Is this possible? Since I am in test mode and since I have other unused VMs I can test with perhaps there is a better way to prepare for such a worse case senario. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Please remember, I know little about this so each detail is important. Experienced users often perform steps between steps that they don't even think about. 