Hello,
I am trying to convert 3 very large physical fileservers into 3 virtual servers. I am using VMware Converter 5.5 and have installed it locally on each server. I am converting directly into an ESXi 5.5 host without vCenter.
Each server is about 15 TB total disk space ( >10TB consumed), but they have different disk setup.
- Server 1 has 1 C: drive, and 2 large volumes on 7,5 TB each.
- Server 2 has 1 C: drive and 8x1,9TB volumes
- Server 3 has 1 C: drive and 1 large volume on 7,5TB and 4x1,9TB
If I choose to run this with default setting (block size level copy, maintain disk size, all volumes on the same datastore) it creates the virtual machine on the ESX server and Converter reports the following task: "Task: Convert physical machnie". After a couple of minutes the newly created virtual machine on the ESX is deleted and after a few more minutes VMware Converter times out and reports the following error message:
- 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.
You would think that this is network related, but as it turns out, everything on the network/DNS side is OK:
If I choose to run the same job, but change the volume size and shrink it below 10 TB, the job runs fine! (Are there any limitations to this in Converter?) The only problem is that by doing this, it changes the copy type from "block level" to "file level". With file level copy you are not able to run synchronization afterwards, which we really need to do since this conversion will take several days and there will be a lot of changes left out if we don't synchronize in the end.
Does anyone have an idea how I could work around this?