ESX 2.5.2 to ESX 3.0.2 Upgrade VM issue

[papadave]

History:

Upgrading three 2.5.2 hosts to 3.0.2, I have successfully upgraded two of the host after migrating their VM's to an interim 3.0.1 cluster with shared SAN visibility in both the old environment and newly upgraded environment.

Problem:

The third of the three 2.5.2 hosts was going smoothly until the last two VM's, they both failed the hot migration so I attempted a cold migration which failed with the following error; " The specified key, name or identifier already exists ", a hot migration of the same VM's generated this error " A specified parameter was not correct " I eventually found the solution to that problem and tried again, but, now I'm getting the following errors... Hot - " A general system error occurred: failed to copy VM config to VMotion dest. (vm.fault.InvalidDeviceBacking)", Cold - "Incompatible device backing specified for device '1' ".

I have researched the errors on the VMWare website and it suggests that this may be due to an older version of P to V helper but the vmdk files for these two VM's are single 20 GB files so this would seem to rule out the issue with COW file structure in 3.0.x...

Summery:

I have tried everything I can think of at this point and anything that coworkers have suggested without success, I had migrated sixty or so VM's between the three 2.5.2 hosts and the 3.0.1 cluster without any major issues so I know our process is working. Any suggestion at this point would be greatly appreciated.

[kristiane]

When I went through the upgrade from 2.5.3 to 3.0.1, I also saw these error messages. I was doing a Cold migration to transfer all the VMs. We have over 200 VMs, and for the most part, they all migrated fine. For the ones that errored out, I basically checked the configuration. I made sure that the Floppy and CD were not connected and that they were set to "Host Device". Even if they were already set, I went ahead and Confirmed again (clicked OK) to re-apply the configuration. Also, for some, if it had Vlance (not vmxnet) for the Network Adapter Type, I removed it. Would do the cold migration without any network adapter, and it seems to work. Also, check your storage. Make sure that any previous failed migration did not create any folder on the destination LUN.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

[papadave]

Kristiane,

Although I appreciate your suggestions I probably should have been more descriptive in my "tried everything I could think of" statement... I had gone through the process of disconnecting CD and Floppy prior to the start of the migration, due of course to learning the hard way on prior migrations, and as a last ditch effort I had disconnected the network adapter... that didn't solve my problem. It's interesting you bring up the folder on the destination LUN, I can watch the folder creation in the datastore as the migration progresses and in fact the GUI progress indicator in VC2 reaches 100%, you can see the VM moved from the source host to the destination then immediately return, the error window pops open and the VM’s folder disappears from the destination LUN... This is so bizarre... I'm really hoping someone has encountered this behavior and has a solution because I'm pretty frustrated at this point...