Converter synchronisation errors after changing location

[Chris83]

Hi VMware-Community,

heres a tough one:

We are currently migrating about 40 Systems where we collect the customers servers (residing on XEN-Hosts) on his site and migrating it to a datacenter.

Since the customers limited bandwith and small migration window, we were planning to virtualise the systems using vmware converter standalone on site and move the host to the datacenter and start synchronising with the source machines.

So we installed an ESXi at the customers site with a Windows Converter VM residing on it.

We virtualized the customers servers to an attached iSCSI-NAS and moved the ESX-Server and the NAS to the datacenter and tried resyncing the VMs without success.

The error on synchronizing appears immediately on clicking "synchronize".

"A fatal error occured. The reason for this might be a network connection failure.

The wizard will close now.

Please check your network connection and try again."

What changed:

• Location of the ESXi and the converter:

        We moved the ESXi-Host and the residing unsynchronised VMs to the Datacenter.

        There I added the Host to a vcenter and tested connections (ping & telnet) to the customers site successfully.

• Connection between ESXi and the customers  Xen-VMs

          Previously the ESXi was attached to the customers switch.

          Now we are using Fortinet Adapters between the customers site and the Datacenter to have a direct connection.

          The customers LAN is switched at the datacenter and we can access the originating VMs at the customers site via LAN.

          Since I'm not the WAN-Guy in our company I have only limited knowledge about the link between the sites.

          Another thing i had to change was the vSwitch the converter VM is using to access the sourceVMs.

          So no new virtual interface or virtual MAC-Address. Just changed the vSwitch which is using different physical NICs on the server.

But here comes the weird part:

If I start an new process of virtualizing a Xen VM via that connection it simply works.

Same ESXi, same ConverterVM, same Storage, Same network settings.

Synchronizing does too. So I am at the point wehere I would rule out general network issues.

I successfully tested the required ports between the converter VM and the Xen-VMs at the customers site.

I sincerely hope that you guys can help me solve this issue because we have terabytes of data to migrate and only a 5Mbit-Link at the customers site, (and a 6hour  drive) between the datacenter and the customers site.

I'm grateful for any tips or hints and would answer any questions.