VMWare Converter – Importing Linux Image Fails at 97%

Sound familiar when trying to P2V using the VMWare Converter utility?

97% seems to always be the magic number for the amount of the way through a conversion job gets if it is ever going to fail. There are plenty of articles and forum discussions out there such as here and here that talk about people’s problems experienced when using the VMWare Converter tool.

I recently had to convert a couple of existing Red Hat Linux guest OS VMWare Server instances into ESX and was presented with the following warning after selecting the destination datastore when using the Converter tools import wizard:

I proceeded with selecting all the usual defaults such as the network to use, checking the box to automatically install the VMTools (after all who wants the hassle of remembering to install them afterwards – especially if converting a large number of instances?) etc. After starting the conversion process everything looked like it was working nicely until I hit the dreaded 97% at which point it failed.

I checked the relevant VM Converter logs, which can be found in ‘C:WindowsTempvmware-temp’ and there was nothing obvious in them to indicate the cause of the problem.

The Solution:

After a little hunting around it appears that by un-checking the ‘Install VM Tools’ option during the conversion wizard process the process will complete successfully. This appears to be a fault peculiar to converting Linux based guest OS’s. Part of the reason for this maybe that Linux in Enterprise level deployments will only boot into a command shell environment thereby negating the requirement for enhanced screen and mouse performance that is desirable with a GUI interface (eg: Windows, Gnome, KDE)? The ‘Warning’ error message mentioned above as it turns out is not related to this particular problem.

This forum posting also discusses this same problem.

It is also important to note that using the VMWare conversion tool to convert Linux guest OS VM instances is only considered ‘experimental’ by VMWare. Check out the VMWare Converter v3/0/2 Update 1 Release Document here under the ‘Supported Guest Operating Systems’ heading for more details.

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