Export failed from Infrastructure Client in ESXi 3.5

[hyberdk]

Hi All,

Hope you can help me, I've searched high and low but cant find the answer anywhere.

I am currently testing ESXi3.5 to port our vmware server system to ESXi. I have a test host up and running with several virtual machines running, no problem everything is great.

However when I try and export a virtual machine (witch are stopped) I keep getting a"Failed to export vurtual appliance: there was an I/O error." Sometimes it happes after a few minutes sometimes almost right away.

I am on the same L2 network as the ESXi with a 100Mbps connection to my laptop. I have also tried from another client witch are connected to the same switch with a 1Gbps connection.

Do anybody have a great idea on how I can export my appliances from ESX. It worries me that I can import them but cant export it again. I just wanted to have a simple ofline backup of a virtual machine.

Cheers

Esben

[weinstein5]

Welcoem to the forums - The preferred way of moving vms form vmware server to ESX is use vmware converter - it will do all the ocnversions for you the only thing you will need to do is install vmware tools when the conversion is complete -

[hyberdk]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick answer. I will try vmware converter if that is better. I actually used this to move my images into ESXi

Cheers

Esben

[malaysiavm]

if the offline conversion for VMware converter is failed, you should try to do it online, more higher success rate.

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Hello Esben, you may want to submit a support request for this. It seems that a number of people have the same issue and the more requests VMware get the more likely it is to be fixed.

[hyberdk]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply, however online conversion is not possible when I try and grab the image and create an appliance..

I might be able to grab the windows system as if it was a physical machine, but thats no good for all our linux hosts

Cheers

Esben

[hyberdk]

I keep getting an error when using vmware converter. It never goes beyound 1%...

I will try from another machine tomorrow. If that fails I can try and post log files if it makes sense to any one here.

Cheers

Esben

[hyberdk]

Hi Dave,

I would create a ticket, however I have already discarded my trial license file, so Im afraid that I'm not authorized for support unless I buy a ticket. It might be the end of it, but I it seems as such a silly problem..

Cheers

Esben

[alip]

Hi hiberdk,

I am apparently having the same kind of failure with an exception that sometime, for no obvious reason? VM Export is manages to complete...

I found no reasonable and repeatable correlations between my environments or export destinations whatsoever and success rate which I would estimate as a 15-20%.

I am wondering if you managed to get it resolved somehow ?

Thanks,

Alex.

[danc256]

Just a few thoughts that may/may not help:

I have a Dell Laptop running Windows XP and when I try to either download large files from the datastore or export a virtual machine it croaks with "Failed to export virtual appliance: There was an I/O error". Downloading small files from the datastore seems to work OK (odd).

If I run the VI Client inside a Windows XP instance that runs inside ESXi as a VM the export runs just fine. This is not helpful if the VM I want to download happens to be the XP Instance running inside ESXi (maybe you could do it with a combination of network drive mapping and snapshots, dunno, didn't try, and I'm sorta new to ESXi to boot).

I download "ProcessMon" from SysInternals (now part of Microsoft) from here to see if there was anything suspicious at the filesystem level on the VI client side:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

Nothing that I could see. It looks like it at least starts the file transfer.

I have an instance of Vista Ultimate that I use for development and

installed the VI Client on there and it appears to be downloading the

VMswithout issue. Aside: The Vista box is on the same unmanaged switch as the ESXi box.

So at this point my theory is its something to do with my network adapter (wild guess). So if you're having issues with large file transfers between the VI client and your machine, either try another machine or perhaps fiddle with the network configuration settings (try turning off anything performance related). Another possibility is running a network cable directly from your machine to the ESXi box to eliminate other variables.

Last, my laptop has a Broadcom Ethernet chipset, and my Vista box has an Atheros Ethernet chipset. Again, I'm not entirely sure that it is the cause.