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alanerm
Contributor
Contributor

V2V xen to ESXi, debian6

hi everyone,

My name is alan and its my first post on this community.

I have a issue importing a V2V debian 6 (kernel 2.6.32-5-amd64) vm from xen 5.6 to ESXi 5.0 with vm converter standalone client version 5.0.0 build-470252.

The conversion fails at 99% then I try to boot the VM created on ESXi host and I receive the next message on the VM console "error loading operating system".

Any idea about this? I still have seven debians to import yet and this error was produced on develop VMs, but the rest of VMs are critical.

thanks all!

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patanassov
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hello,

importing XEN VMs with VMware Converter is not supported (and not implemented), especially if they use paravirtualization. You may google and find some articles about how to do it manually.

If they don't use paravirtualization, you'll still have to do something manually, but it will be easier. The failure you experienced is during reconfiguration, which means all data have been successfully copied. Reconfiguration basically has three steps - installing GRUB, making the initrd, and fixing fstab. These usually can be done after booting the installation CD in a rescue mode.

HTH

Plamen

alanerm
Contributor
Contributor

Hi again,

Thanks for your help dude!..

I reinstalled the GRUB on the VM, but I cant boot the system yet. What do you mind with "making the initrd"?.

At this moment when I power on the VM, I can select the kernel type on de grub menu, after that, the lights on my keyboard start to flashing and the VM not respond any more.

As you say, the information on disk are there, but cant boot up the VM.

On the other hand, I try to restore a snapshot of the same VM on XENSERVER, and automatically the disk as been deleted, cant find the VM on the datastore, even his UUID. That situation has very complicated now, Im only have a vmdk on vmware with bootup problems.

All these problems are delayed the migration progress.

thank for you help again.

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patanassov
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi again,

making the initrd involve running mkinitrd or  mkinitramfs. Not sure about Debian, but Ubuntu uses mkinitramfs, I would  expect the same.

Before that you should be adding drivers for the virtual  environment. You will probably need pcnet32 or e1000 for network and  mptbase,mptscsih,mptspi for LSI Logic. Probably defined in  initramfs.conf (or modprobe.conf or something else? depends on distro).

It is not trivial, search in Debian forums what is needed to run in VMware virtual environment.

Check whether your machine uses paravirtual kernel. If it does, you should replace it. There was a guide for that - google for "Converting XEN" and "Marcelo Soares"

HTH

Plamen

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