Copying a VM from VC to ESXi

[CJR]

Hi, my first post. Thanks to everyone for the wealth of knowledge I have gained from reading these forumsso far.

We run VC 2.5 and 3 * ESX 3.5 servers (IBM x3650 connected to an IBM SAN)

I am trying to copy a VM to a standalone IBM x346 running ESXi free version.

I have tried manually copying the files, and also using VMware converter .

Each time it appears to be successful, however when I try and start the VM I get a message " A general system error occurred: Internal error"

Should this work? Or is the different hardware the problem? I would have thought VMware converter would take care of this?

If not is there some other way of copying a VM from VC to a standalone ESXi on different hardware??

Thanks

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Forums - The VM is not on VC but on an ESX host managed by VC so can you add the standalone ESXi host temporarily to your VC environment? If you can then you should be able to cold migrate the vm to the ESXi host - as long as both are running 3.5 either ESX or ESXi it should not be a problem particulalry when doing a cold migration when the vm is powered off - what happens when you run converter because it shoudl work -

[CJR]

I can add it but when I try to access it get a license error "there are not enough license installed to perform the operation"

When I run converter it completes successfully, and the VM is added to the inventory successfuly - just get the error when I try to power it on.

[Peter_vm]

Check ESXi version number. I hope you are not running on expired version.

[CJR]

Downloaded and installed ESXi last week - version 3.5.0 build 103909

ESX servers are version 3.5.0 build 64607. I haven't installed either of the updates

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You'll want to patch for ESXi hosts to build 110271 - http://kb2.vmware.com/kb/1006670.html

[weinstein5]

Being the Free ESXi version it does not come with the VC agent license - so unless you had extra VC agent license you would get that error - what O/S are you running on the VM?

But looking at the KB article Dave pointed you to should take care of it -

Message was edited by: weinstein5

[CJR]

Thanks, patch fixed it. I still can't believe I didn't put 2 + 2 together, especially after all ther emails and articles from Vmware last week..........