Hi,
I recently dusted off my old home lab ESXi to bring it up to speed (no vCenter server at the moment, I'm planning to introduce one after upgrading this box). As part of that, I exported the VMs to make a clean fresh installation, but with one VM I have an issue that I can't really explain. The mentioned VM has a 400GB vDisk and it appears to have some kind of issue, either on the file itself or on the VMFS. I have tried the following:
- Exporting the VM using the vSphere client, stops a few hours into the process with the message that the process simply was aborted
- Exporting the VM via SCP/SFTP. After roughly 163GB, the transfer stops. Again with the message that the connection was aborted.
- Since I thought it may be size related, I tried gzipping the vmdk file on the shell, but that stopped at 110GB size of the zipped file as well. I don't have that message anymore, but I think the command said something like "file cannot be read".
- Using the ovftool from the client to export it form the host. I don't have that error available at the moment, but it stopped a few hours in as well.
The Converter doesn't even want to connect to the host, but I guess I have to try it with an older version.
The VM itself starts normally and doesn't show any sign of corruption on the file system in the guest OS. I removed all snapshots as well and consolidated the files. The host to which I exported the VM has enough free space and uses NTFS, so file size shouldn't be an issue there either.
The error messages don't really provide much information about the cause, but I'll try to reproduce it again today and update this post once I have the exact messages. This requires a few hours though, this box has doesn't have the latest and greatest hardware.
So far I didn't have any issues exporting large VMs, so I'm a bit stumped here. I found that vSphere 6 provides the "voma" command to check the VMFS for errors, but since I'm using 5.1, I guess that is not an option. Any ideas why this could happen?
Thanks in advance
