Problems doing a v2v from ESXi 4 to 5

[manak13]

Hi Guys,

I am having problems migrating a vm from a ESXi 4 host to a ESXi 5 host using vmware converter.  So, I installed the newest available version 5.0 for converter and found out that it crashes everytime I try to doing a v2v.  Looked on the web and saw a few links that confirm this behaviour and folks seem to have been able to do a v2v using a older 4.0 or 4.3 converter.

So, I installed and tried both converter version 4.0 and 4.3 without any luck.  With these versions at least converter does not crash and gets a bit further but now on my 5.x virtual center I get a error message that says "is not supported for the current virtual machine version 'vmx-04' a minimum version of 'vmx-06' is required for this operation".  Now the source vm is set to hardware version 7 and not sure why it is complaining about vmx-04.  So, started searching the web again to find out that people that ran into this issue ended up fixing it by upgrading their converter version to the lates 5.0

Hrmm.. so not really sure where to go from here.  Converter version 5.0 definitely does not work for me and consistently crashes before starting any v2v.  If I use the older 4.x versions I get that not supported error message.

Any help you can provide would be grately appreciated.

Thanks.

[schepp]

Hi,

why exactly to you use converter to transfer the VM over to the new ESXi? I guess because the two ESXi have no shared storage?

How about a simple copy over to the new Datastore with SCP?

Regards

[UmeshAhuja]

Hi,

Try doing the below steps, Another way for moving the VM without converter.

1) Power off and unregister the VM from Host 1
2) Copy/Move the VM folder from Host 1 Datastore to your Local path
3) Copy/Move the VM folder from Local path to Host 2 datastore
4) Register the VM by clicking the .vmx file and adding it to inventory
5) Power on the VM from Host 2

[manak13]

The problem is that if I scp or copy/move this to another datstore manually the thin provision of the vmdk's are lost.  I would prefer to get this migrated via converter.  I dont' have a shared datastore between these 2 environments.

-Simran

[a_p_]

Maybe exporting/importing as OVF (from the "File" menu) is a solution in this case!?

André

[sparrowangelste]

for v2v in most cases it doesnt make sense not to use ova/ovf.

there are certain cercustances where using converter is needed, but ova works great.

[deemee1988]

Hello manak13,

I have performed many v2v from ESX 3.5/4.x to ESXi 5.0, but never encpuntered a problem. I use VMware Converter 5.0 for convertion.

Could you please post the error of Converter 5.0 to investigate further.

Regards,

deemee1988