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ToddH_
Contributor
Contributor

Un-linking a linked clone? v2v? Converter?

I'm in need of some advice on unlinking a linked clone VM.  VM's created in Workstation, now used in Fusion 3.x in OSX Snow Leoppard.

I have a Windows XP VM (named "Trusted") that is unfortunately linked to a 2 year old snapshot of another XP VM ("Surfing").  This Surfing VM has grown huge and unwieldy over the years as I've taken more and more snapshots along the way, attempts to delete some old snapshots in Fusion 3.1.4 are met with "unable to delete files" errors and after ignoring that for a bit...  I of course find myself very very tight on disk space.   I'd like to ditch the Surfing VM and start it over, but keep the bare minimum disk footprint of the current state of the Trusted VM.

These Surfing and Trusted  VM's were originally created in Workstation, and unfortunately the Trusted VM I care about is a linked clone from a very early snapshot of the Surfing VM.   They now live in Fusion 3.1.4 which seems to lack much of a native notion of what to do with linked clones other than being able to use them.

Q1:  What is the appropriate way to uncouple this Trusted VM from the Surfing VM?   Manual hacking on some vmx files?  Would getting to Fusion 4.x be of any help?  Fusion 5 is out but I think I'd have to upgrade from Snow Leoppard to do that (and I'm not sure I'm ready for that).   Or...  is  VMWare Converter and/or v2v is going to be involved?  If so, what's a way I can get that software as just a licensed Workstation/Fusion person?  Appeal to the VCenter folks at work for a favor?

Q2; If so, what version of Converter or v2v would be appropriate assuming my clean copy of both of these machines was last touched by  (gasp) Fusion 3.1.4 on Snow Leoppard?   http://www.vmware.com/pdf/convsa_50_guide.pdf  seems to point me in a cold conversion with Converter Enterprise 4.1.x direction for this need.  But perhaps there's another way I just don't know about yet?  

Thanks for any pointers!

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ToddH_
Contributor
Contributor

[moving from Fusion forum to Converter forum]

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

use vmware-vdiskmanager to create a full clone of the vmdk
when that is done you only need to exchange the filename of the vmdk file in the vmx-file


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

ToddH_
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for this input.   I've never used or heard of that tool before. If you know off the top of your head where I'd download or find that.. I'd be happy to try it.

[ edit:  Ah ha:  found it  /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-vdiskmanager]

For what it's worth... I've struck out with Converter.  I've now tried 4.0 4.3 and 5.0 versions of converter from within an XP vm of my Fusion setup... and sadly, the Apple file references in the vmx file seems to confuse the crap out of converter, according the the logs of th worker service.       With 4.3 and 5.0 I saw nothing but "unable to obtain hardware information for the selected machine"  while 4.0 complained of a file i/o error (and also seems not to support fusion 3.x).

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ToddH_
Contributor
Contributor

Ulli Hankeln wrote:

use vmware-vdiskmanager to create a full clone of the vmdk
when that is done you only need to exchange the filename of the vmdk file in the vmx-file

Ulli,  I've looked into this utility.   Are you suggesting perhaps something like this?  (My source vmdk's are in 2GB chunks fwiw).

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-vdiskmanager -r "Windows XP Professional-cl1-000002.vmdk"  -t 1 destinationDisk.vmdk

And then manually editing the .vmx file to point at destinationDisk.vmdk?

Unfortunately, that gets about 24% of the way in and throws this error:

"Convert: 24% done.Failed to convert disk: A file access error occurred on the host or guest operating system (0x5000900000007)." 

Which makes me increasingly convinced VMWare just hates me this week.

Am I correct in thinking vmware-vdiskmanager does the magic of follow parent references for the Trusted vm's   Windows XP Professional-cl1-000002.vmdk to Windows XP Professional-cl1-000001.vmdk to Windows XP Professional-cl1.vmdk  and its references back to the "Surfing" VM's    Windows XP Professional-000006.vmdk ... all the way back up to its Windows XP Professional.vmdk,  the -t 1   converts all that into a single disk in 2GB chunks that doesn't depend on all those snapshots up the chain and the clone's linked parent snapshots up its chain?

Thanks much for any further insight or confirmation on how vmware-vdiskmanager works.

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POCEH
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Try to do P2V with your XP VM. HTH

ToddH_
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for this suggestion. I tried it. I installed Converter 4.3 onto the trusted VM and went about cloning the running local machine out to an external disk.  Fusion 3.x to a fusion 3.x, 2GB growable disk pieces (target drive is FAT) and this conversion ... also fails precisely at 24% just like the vmware-vdiskmanager did.  Unlike vdiskmanager, it gives a bit more specific an error though:

Operation on file "/Users/username/path/to/Trusted XP/Windows XP Professional-cl1-000002-s002.vmdk"  failed.

and gives options to retry (tried, same issue),  abort and continue.

I believe I've tried vmware-vdiskmanager -R    on all the main vmdk's and it indicated no issues, so I'm a bit confused if there's a problm with that snapshot's strip.    At this point I think my best play is to give up on making this trusted VM stack any smaller,  be happy it runs at all, get the data off it and build a fresh w7 VM for trusted purposes. 

Unless anyone has seen this issue and has further ideas?

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

vmware-vdiskmanager -R function is broken  - dont hope that it will ever help you recover a vmdk :smileycry:


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

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POCEH
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Please upload log with failed conversion, there could be more detailed error...

And just curious why you use Converter 4.3 instead of latest Converter 5.0.1?

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RParker
Immortal
Immortal

http://tweaks.com/windows/40123/convert-physical-machines-to-virtual-with-disk2vhd/

Use that to convert the image as a VHD file, then convert it to VMDK with:

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter

When it comes to P2V conversion, VM Converter is rather picky..

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ToddH_
Contributor
Contributor

Ulli Hankeln wrote:

vmware-vdiskmanager -R function is broken  - dont hope that it will ever help you recover a vmdk :smileycry:

I'll drink to that.    I'm not trying to recover one in this case, but I can confirm that it sees no problems with any of my vmdk's  though apparently both Converter  and vmware-vdiskmanager -r   do (but are awfully darned circumspect about the details). 

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ToddH_
Contributor
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POCEH wrote:

Please upload log with failed conversion, there could be more detailed error...

And just curious why you use Converter 4.3 instead of latest Converter 5.0.1?

Thanks for your time and help.   Where does Converter, when run on a running host that it's converting, stash that log file?

In researching various Fusion 3 issues, there were overtones of newer converters being problematic for use with Fusion 3.   I suppose I could try 5. 

The full log has a lot of variuos SSL cert chain errors in it and invalid warnings about the destination not being large enough (there were hundreds of GB of free space, far less than the 20GB of this vm), but it ends with an unceremonious

[#3] [2012-12-10 22:06:45.650 00632 info 'task-2'] CloneTask updates, state: 1, percentage: 24, xfer rate (Bps): 6974920
[#3] [2012-12-10 22:06:45.650 01716 info 'task-1'] Worker CloneTask updates, state: 1, percentage: 24, xfer rate (Bps): 8626176
[#3] [2012-12-10 22:06:45.650 01716 info 'task-1'] Worker CloneTask updates, state: 1, percentage: 24, xfer rate (Bps): 6974464

Seems several flavors of vmware tools are telling me to finally move to win7 and Fusion 5.   

Thanks for everyone's help on this!   Seems at this point starting off clean would be better than going further down this rabbit hole than I have.   

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ToddH_
Contributor
Contributor

I've found a "works for me" solution to this one, by manually  moving (then testing/deleting) unnecessary snapshot vmdk's in the filesystem.

Recalling the scenario being that a VMICareabout (TrustedVM)   is linked to the early snapshot of VMThatsHugeNowAndIDon'tCareAbout (Surfing) ...    I finally had the guts to simply move (in the filesystem) all the vmdk files associated with snapshots  newer than the parent to which the Trusted VM is linked.

The formula if you will:

in the Trusted vm I want to keep... look at the oldest  .vmdk file.   E.g. /Users/me/My Virtual Machines/TrustedVM/Windows XP Professional-cl1.vmdk   had for the parentCID in there and parent filename:

parentFileNameHint="/Users/me/My Virtual Machines/SurfingVM/Windows XP Professional-000006.vmdk"

The simple observation:   All vmdk's larger than 6  in that "bloated SurfingVM I want to die"  can probably be deleted.

To test this theory I just created a subdirectory called maybe-not-needed  inside the SurfingVM directory and then moved all the vmdk's numbered 7,8,9,10,11...20,21... all the way up to 30 to that directory.

mv /Users/me/My\ Virtual\ Machines/SurfingVM/Windows\ XP\ Professional-00001*  maybe-not-needed/
mv /Users/me/My\ Virtual\ Machines/SurfingVM/Windows\ XP\ Professional-00000[789]* maybe-not-needed/
mv /Users/me/My\ Virtual\ Machines/SurfingVM/Windows\ XP\ Professional-0000[23]*  maybe-not-needed/

and then tested starting up the TrustedVM.  As I'd hoped, it worked fine since all the vmdk's associaed with Windows XP Professional-000006.vmdk and earlier (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) were there.   I got back 47GB of space when I moved all the later snapshots off to an external disk (just in case ... if no surprises show up in a week, I'll delete em).   I don't intend to use that SurfingVM any further as I've created a more streamlined standalone one.

I didn't succeed at collapsing these two machines into one vmdk entirely, but this is close enough for the space savings I was hoping to achieve.

Thanks to all for the ideas!

ToddH_
Contributor
Contributor

RParker wrote:

http://tweaks.com/windows/40123/convert-physical-machines-to-virtual-with-disk2vhd/

Use that to convert the image as a VHD file, then convert it to VMDK with:

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter

When it comes to P2V conversion, VM Converter is rather picky..

I wanted to thank you for this suggestion.  I think this sort of approach would've worked.  I stopped short of it trying to minimize the amount of other software I'd have to trust in order to get it done.  Knowing that I'm not the only one for whom Converter has failed was also useful.  

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