Converter and Server hang at 7%...

[bigusdadius]

I have three DL320's all with the AMI MegaIDE failing during the conversion at the 7% mark and taking the physical machine with it. All three servers are W2K SP4 with Update Roll-Up 1 freshly re-applied.

Looking at the logs, I see the following lines repeating...

#2] \[2007-05-29 14:37:47.359 'App' 2496 verbose] \[imageProcessingTaskWrapper,437] Waiting for updates from BlockLevelVolumeCloning::task\{6}

\[#2] \[2007-05-29 14:37:47.359 'App' 2496 verbose] \[imageProcessingTaskWrapper,668] (Re)Start waiting for property updates from BlockLevelVolumeCloning::task\{6}

Anyone seen this behavior before?

[esiebert7625]

How big is the hard drive on the physical servers? Try re-sizing the drives slightly smaller (10MB) to invoke a file level clone instead of a block level. Are you running Converter directly on the physical servers? What is your destination?

Also see the best practices I have posted here...

http://vmware-land.com/Converter.html

[admin]

Make sure that your machine rebooted properly after Converter installs the agent used to clone the machine. If not, you may need to install and run Converter directly from that machine.

[bigusdadius]

The HDDs are approx 30GB with at least a few gigs of free space and yes, I'm running the converter directly from the server to be virtualized. All un-necessary services have been stopped. I've tried pointing to each of the three ESX servers in the farm - I have been successful in converting 8 other servers with various makes/models, but the three with the AMI MegaIDE are all experiencing the same failures.

I will definitely try re-sizing and let you know what happens, nice site and thanks for the suggestions.

[bigusdadius]

I mis-spoke in the my last response, one server has a 75GB drive with 68GB used, when I attempt to resize it I receive the message that 75GB is the minimum size required...

[bigusdadius]

I attempted to resize one of the other servers and it allowed me, but froze at 19%...twice. I have a call into support and they are pouring thru the logs now.

[esiebert7625]

Connectivity problems maybe? Let us know what you find out from support.

[bigusdadius]

Possibly, but I was able to convert 2 other servers while I'm waiting on an answer from support.

I suspect it has something to do with the integrated IDE RAID card...but we'll see, I'll definitely update this post once I hear back.

[sbeaver]

I had an issue like this and ended up having to make sure the duplexing was correct

[bigusdadius]

I finally heard back from support...

...our findings indicate that the problem with the conversion of these 3 boxes is related to the AMI Mega IDE disk controller.

From our research we found that this is not a particularly fast nor smart controller, as it seems to do most of its work in software through drivers, instead of on the actual hardware. With particularly troublesome hardware such as this controller, we have found that a good way to finish the virtualization of a machine is to use Ghost as an imaging solution, since its hardware support is a lot less forgiving than Converter. Then to run Converter against the Ghost sv2i file instead of the original machine, and the conversion will go through...

[esiebert7625]

Thanks for updating us...