Conversion failure at 99% for Redhat

[araostore]

Hi all:

I am using vmware converter 5.0 to convert a physical Linux box to a VM to be installed on a ESX 4.1 server.

I get through all the points and fails at 99% during re-configuration.

The error message is  " RHEL version not supported by reconfig ". Please see my attachment.

Message implies that the software doesn't support the Redhat release, and sure enough I was trying to convert a "Redhat Enterprise Release 6.1" and the release notes says it supports upto "RedHat enterprise Release 5x" .

So, my question is if there is any way to get the RHEL 6.x to work? Since it is happening in the last stage (re-configuration stage) anything that I could modify to complete the conversion?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Arvind

PS: I have converted other supported OS on this setup, so my guess that there is no setup issue.

[ivivanov]

No, it is not a setup issue. This is a known issue with Converter 5.0. The problem is in rebuilding initrd image. RHEL configuration has changed from /etc/modprobe.conf file on RHEL5 and before to /etc/modprobe.d *directory* on RHEL6 and the file format has changed as well. For rebuilding initrd Converter adds these lines to /etc/modprobe.conf

alias scsi_hostadapter mptbase

alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptscsih

alias scsi_hostadapter2 mptspi

before any other scsi_hostadapter entries that could be present on the source. After that it runs mkinitrd with default options, specifying only new initrd image name (it is the original initrd image name, the original file was backed up before that) and the kernel version (e. g. # mkinitrd <newInitrdFile> <kernelVersion>).

What we tried was to change the Converter code to handle the new directory structure (modprobe.d instead of modprobe.conf) and patching dist.conf file. The conversion succeeded but the target VM still didn't boot complaining about missing root filesystem and we didn't have more time to investigate it further with regards to the time constraints of the 5.0 release, so RHEL 6 support was postponed. At first glance it looked for some reason the target did not have the correct SCSI drivers and could not recognize the disk holding the root volume (however the last statement could be totally wrong as we didn't have time to investigate it in details).

Hope this helps,

Ivan

[iaco]

I've actually managed to convert a RHEL 6.2 without reconfiguring the initrd afterwards. I'm not sure if it was actually related to the specific hardware I was converting or not (an HP blade). Here are the details: http://pleasedonttouchthescreen.blogspot.com/2011/12/p2v-redhat-6.html

[abbie11]

Hi araostore

During cloning of powered-on Linux machines, Converter Standalone 4.0.1  preserves the following source file systems on the target: ext2, ext3,  reiserfs, and vfat. All other source file systems are converted into  ext3 file systems on the target virtual machine.

Yours, Abbie

[vKim33]

I successfully converted a rhel 6.2 p2v by running VMware vCenter Convert 5.0  until I received the conversion failure, created a new virtual machine as a linux rhel 6.2, deleted the hard drive, copied hard drive files from failed conversion (hard drive copies are good) to new rhel 6 directory, modifed settings to add all the hard drives as existing drives and attached to the drives I copied from failed conversion.

thanks

vKim33