Converting a virtual machine with converter client from local disk

[marburg]

Hello community,

due to some limitations on our firewall, the vCenter server is not directly accessible from the network I want to convert VMs from. Because of that, I installed the vCenter Converter Server on the only host that is available from this network, which can redirect the conversion to the vCenter or the ESX directly. To test if this works, I installed the vCenter Converter Client on a system, which connects to the Converter Server behind the firewall. So far so good, but somehow I can't select VMs to be converted from my local disk, just from network shares, and even that doesn't work somehow.

An I doing something wrong here to select VMs from my local disk, or is the Converter Client really limited to this? If there is really this limitation, why? I don't see any advantage, just disadvantages.

Please help me to understand this right, I'd appreciate every answer.

Thank you in advance.

Best regards

marburg

Update: Version is 4.3.0

Update 2: Ah OK I see, I should've read better... looks like the Server-Client architecture of the Converter is obviously not what I'm looking for, the Server still needs access to these resources. Is there any simple way to work around this problem?

[continuum]

Install Converter directly on the system you want to import.
For NT, 2000, XP and 2003 use version 3.0.3 - reboot after installation if it is NT or 2000
For Windows 7 and 2008 and 2008 R2 use version 4.3
For Vista - just kidding - nobody imports Vista

Then start Converter and select Workstation as the target - store the VM on a portable USB-disk using 2gb split growing disk.
Store the vmdk as import.vmdk

Then when done - go to a host that has direct access with winscp, fastscp or datastorebrowser.
Upload the vmx-file and the vmdk including all slices to a new directory on your datastore.

open a console on ESX or ESXi with putty - cd to the directory on the datastore and run
vmkfstoools -i import.vmdk system.vmdk -d thin

then right click the vmx and register the VM
open Viclient - find the VM and replace import.vmdk with system.vmdk

done

[marburg]

Thanks for your response Continuum, but somehow I can't directly see what this has to do with my problem. The process should be quite simple since it should be executable for peopel who don't know anything about VMware products.

I'll explain it again, maybe I wasn't clear enough in the first post:

At the moment, there are 2 networks, network 1 and network 2. The vCenter Server and ESX servers are all located in network 2, the clients and workstations that will access vSphere are located in network 1. There is a firewall between the two networks and only one host in network 2 is reachable from network 1, this one is not the vCenter Server. So what I'm searching for is some solution that redirects the conversion from a host in network 1 over the only reachable host in network 2 to the vCenter Server or the ESX host directly. I suggested that the Client-Server Infrastructure of the Standalone Converter would provide this, but as it turns out it doesn't.

As I was writing this text I realized that there is already a Terminal Server running on the reachable host, from where I made the Converter available for execution from network 1. With shared drives for the RDP connection that is created when using the Converter as a RemoteApp, I was able to choose the VM from the shared drive, but that's it then... Somehow the Converter can' read information from the VM and so I'm stuck again. After googling a bit, I found out that there might be a problem with files larger than 2GB when trying to convert from a shared drive and the fix was to assign the host to this specific share (?!?). I couldn't find out how to do this for RDP-Session shared drives.

Any suggestions?

Thank you very much in advance.

[continuum]

so you are asking how to create a proxy for all the protocols Converter uses ?

sorry - I have no idea and also think trying this makes no sense at all.

[marburg]

Hm, so I guess I'm stuck with converting the VMs all by myself then, but the mentioned proxy sounds like what I'm searching for. I guess I have to hope for an infrastructure change or to get more slots on the FW

Thanks for your help.

Best regards

marburg

[bulletprooffool]

There are 3 ways to address this:

1. Get the relevant ports opened between you server and the vCenter (not optimal)
2. Patch the Server into the same network as the vCenter server and allocate and IP for the conversion (my prefered optoin)
3. Use the above method to create a VM workstation image, then import the vmdks you have created to your ESX host . . more details on the second portion of the process here:

http://www.get-virtual.info/2011/01/28/importing-a-vm-from-vm-workstation-to-esx-esxi/