Problem using existing disks

[Kassebasse]

I have tried and use some virtual hard drives from my previous setup that was just vmware player.

Now when I triy and use them in vSphere, I get this error message:

http://imgur.com/a/gIPLq

I have tried with several virtual hard drives and none of them is working.

I get the same error message. Is it a Esxi version that I specificly have to use?

Or do I have to reinstall everything?

Importing .ovi files is working at least.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Products like VMware Workstation, PLayer, or Fusion use a virtual disk file format, which is built to save disk sapce on the host. This file format is not supported on ESXi hosts anymore. In order to use such virtual disks on ESXi they need to be converted. This can either be done the way you did it - i.e. by exporting/importing as OVF/OVA -, or by converting the disks from the command line.

On VMware Wokstation, or Fusion that's the vmware-vdiskmanager command line utility, on ESXi it's vmkfstools with the option.

I didn't try to convert such virtual disks on the latest ESXi versions, but I think it still works.

André

[Kassebasse]

Thank you. It did work. I used Vmware vCenter Converter, and that did the trick.