VMWare Workstation to ESX Conversion Help

R

rhansen5_99

2[H]4U
Joined
Nov 12, 2001
Messages
2,153
Hey guys I am running into a bit of a snag and was wondering if you guys have any suggestions. Basically I am trying to migrate some vms from VMWare Workstation 9 on a local server to a ESX server in a Colo facility. I am trying to use Vcenter Converter but I think that the VPN connection between the two locations is timing out causing the conversion to fail. The VM's are about 80gb and the speed is around 1.5mb/s of the transfer.

I do have access to the datastore and copy the vkmd and vmx files directly but we attempting this I get a incompatible version warning or something of that nature. Is there a way to get the converter to create the proper kind of file without connecting to the infrastructure? Or possibly a freeware tool to help out?

Thanks a bunch.
 
You don't need the converter.

Post your error message. There's likely a simple fix for it. Workstation 9 VMs work in ESXi straight up.
 
Do you have any way to spin up a local ESXi server and do the conversion locally before transferring the files over the VPN? They should not need to be converted however...
 
If they existed pre-9/10 versions of workstation, the disks are in an incompatible format.
 
Hey guys sorry for the delay and I really appreciate all the help. As far as the workstation version i think they were set to 8 so i used the built in tools in workstation to upgrade them to 9. I am guessing that this is the issue with the blind copy to the datastore.

As far as the version of ESXI is 5.0.0 . The error message from converter is something along the lines of fatal error network connection failure, this happens around 40-65 percent. The error from ESXI when trying to initialize was along the lines of incorrect type (so i think the convert to v9 will help :) )

Also I do not have a local ESXI server to mess around with as that is in another office.
 
Last edited:
Load ESXi5 into a VM in Workstation and see what happens. You will need to load FreeNAS or something as a datastore for the ESXi server to use.
 
You really don't need the converter at all.

Now that your Workstation really is 9, can you boot the VM in ESXi? If not, what's the exact error message?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top