Importing an appliance in VI3

[naltoidaddict]

I've not had good luck importing a vm into vi. In fact I don't think I've ever successfully imported a linux vm. Will the vmware converter work for linux? If not, what's process for importing a linux appliance?

It seems every time I try it takes forever and fails at 99% (of course).

[khughes]

Its been a while since I used converter and did a P2V but I remember even though it fails at 99% that doesn't always mean it didn't finish converting, possibly that it just failed to register the VM into the location you were pointing it or you just need to do a little work with the vmx file. You might want to look at the LUN you were converting it to and see if it is there and if so monkey around with it. I think we had a couple servers that failed at 96% when we did our conversion but they actually converted fine just needed a little work at the end to finish it up.

• Kyle

[jitendrakmr]

in which format the source appliance is? is it *.ovf? Then you can import it using VI client by clicking on "File > Virtual Appliance> Import" option.

If your source is another machine(either physical or virtual) then you can try VMWare Converter and if lucky it will work because Linux has thousand of varieties.

If that doesnt work then you can use Ghost to create image of running physical machine and then copy this ghost image to any running VM (we can call it as helper machine) and their you can add another virtual disk of same size of source machine's physical disk and then restore the ghost image to this newly added virtual disk. Now using this virtual disk you can create another virtual machine and you have the physical Linux machine converted into a Virtual Machine!

Jitendra Kumar

MCSE 2003, VCP, CCNA, ITIL Foundation

[kjb007]

I agree with khughes. Check the destination, as I've had several vm's where I've had the same results. The process gets to 99%, but at that point, the data has been copied, and the vm is pretty much ready to go.

-KjB

[naltoidaddict]

odd, it "just worked" which has never happened before. unfortunately the appliance kernel panicked on first boot. I'll mess around with the settings and see if I can get anything out of it.

it's this one here, which I thought shouldn't be a problem but obviously I'm missing something

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1003

[espi3030]

Also, you might want to try the latest version of VMware converter if not already. I had trouble importing Xtravirt's Virtual SAN appliance until I upgraded, even then I recall having some issues but the appliance works fine.

Hope this helps!