Converter fails on 2TB Windows server conversion

[fhpaschen]

I wonder if anyone has seen this before. I have a Windows 2003 server with a 2TB NTFS non-system disk partition. I am attempting to convert this to an ESX 3.0.1 system using the latest VMware converter. The converter fails when creating the target virtual machine with an error of "unsupported block size: 4096" in the logs. Now, the target VMFS store originally was a 2TB (8MB block size) partition which I then extended with extents to 2.25TB as the converter originally would not let me move my 2047.96GB partition into it. With the 2.25TB partition, it fails with the above error. It also fails if I resize the partition to the minimum 1.2TB with the same error.

My gut is telling me that converter has issues with 8MB block size VMFS partitions.

Has anyone successfully converted a 2TB windows partition? I fear I'm going to be stuck going with some other method (xcopy between machines or some strange iSCSI/RDM trickery with the NetApp to move the data to a pre-created 2TB virtual machine (which I can do just fine through Virtual Center))

Kevin

[theanykey]

If you got the same error when converting a 1.2TB partition over to ESX with a vmfs blocksize of 8mb, then you should most definately open up a service request ticket to see if there is indeed a bug. this, by design, should work. Just keep in mind the file size can not be larger then 2TB.

[oreeh · Accepted solution]

AFAIK the maximum supported VMDK size is 950GB.

Anything greater requires RDMs.

[fhpaschen]

I did open up a support ticket with VMware and they also indicated this was not possible with converter although the documentation didn't reflect it that I could see. From the response:

"I have tested Vmware converter 3.0, 3.0.1, and 3.0.2 (the latest version). They all have this restriction of 999GB as the maximum size of a single disk that will be allowed to be converted. I cannot find a description of this in the documentation (), but it has been verified. This rules out upgrading Converter."

Thanks for the confirmation. Hopefully this will help others trying this. I'm just going to go ahead and convert the OS partition and migrate the 2TB of shares over using our backup/restore method.

Kevin