Unable to P2V using vCenter Converter

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KapsZ28

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May 29, 2009
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I ran into an annoying issue and I am not able to P2V an old Dell servers running Windows Server 2008. I am using the latest VMware vCenter Converter Standalone v5.5.3. The physical Windows server is in the same DC as our ESXi servers and vCenter. Different subnets, but networking has been setup so there is full access. No firewalls are turned on. The Converter is running on a VM.

Every time I try to run it, the VM is created, then after a couple of minutes it fails without copying any data and deletes the VM. The error is;

"An error occurred while opening a virtual disk. Verify that the converter server and the running source machines have a network access to the source and destination ESX/ESXi hosts."

Based on research, it would seem to be a SSL certificate. In vCenter I went to the SSL Settings and made sure "vCenter Server requires verified SSL certificates" is checked. I also changed the useSSL on the Converter VM to "false". Didn't seem to make a difference. I can't remove and re-add the ESXi hosts since they have several VMs with FT enabled, but I can't imagine that is even the issue as all thumbprints were accepted.

I even tried a different vCenter in another DC. Simply setup an IPSec tunnel, made sure the subnets in the firewall had the Access rules to Any so no ports are blocked. Same issue in different environment.

I've tried rebooting, running the Converter as Administrator. Using a Converter on a different VM. Even installed the Converter on the server I am trying to convert. None of it seems to work.

Any ideas other than supposedly removing and re-adding the ESXi hosts into vCenter?
 
Well, I guess it is a vCenter issue. I found an old ESXi host that isn't attached to vCenter and so far it looks like the data is copying. Hopefully it finishes successfully.
 
FWIW, I had issues with the latest vCenter Converter. I can't remember exactly what, but it just didn't work.
I had to roll back a version or two.
 
Well this is interesting. I removed Converter v5.5 and installed v5.1. This time I received the error below.

FAILED: An error occurred during the conversion: 'Platform-specific error 2338'

I Googled that error and found this article. http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/VMWare/Q_28296452.html

For anyone without an EE account, he was getting the same error with 5.1. Then he upgraded to 5.5 and started getting the original error I was getting.

FAILED: An error occured while opening a virtual disk. Verify that the Converter server and the running source machines have a network access to the source and destination ESX/ESXi hosts

His fix was to add the IP address and ESXi hostnames to the "hosts" file on the physical server he was converting.

I find that a bit odd as I've never seen DNS be the cause of an issue. Both subnets have full access to each other. Instead of updating the hosts file, I simply changed the DNS server and DNS suffix on the NIC in the physical server and it seems to be working.

I guess the Converter is really more for a single environment and not for P2V'ing customer servers into your infrastructure.
 
Connect to the target ESX server directly, not through vCenter.

See if that works.
 
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