When proceeding to cloning a Linux server, we identify an erratic behavior The OS version that was involve in this process was a RHEL 6.4 (Santiago), running on a physical server.
As the official VMWare documentation explain, when you proceed to virtualize a Linux system, the process has to create a VM called Helper, into the virtual environment.
During this process, we sniffing the communication, to understand ports and the whole connections required during these task, detect that the process started with the communication through the SSH protocol, between the physical RHEL and the Converter, and through port 443, between the Converter and the hypervisor side.
When the conversion process reaches the step to build the helper vm, the communication stops.
We proceeded to analyze the different logs/registers, and detected, that the build of vm helper never ended correctly, if we wanted to use a specific network in our virtual environment, which had different vlans tags, defined.
In the other hand, we have made, countless succeed P2V conversions in other networks before and the whole process finished in a successfully way
So, the next step was to identify the differences between this network configuration in our vSwitch and in our virtualization environment, with the rest of the networks in which we have made innumerable P2V conversions before.
The difference that appeared between this network and others that were configured in the virtual environment was that it had several vlans tags. Having identified this, we could understand that the problem was that the converter, which could not tag these vlans.
In other words, this was the root cause, and why the converter could not finish the construction of the virtual Helper machine in our virtual environment.
Team used:
Converter 6.2.0 Build 7348398
RHEL 6.4 (Santiago)
VCenter 6.0.0 Build 3634794
