VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0 - P2V SLES 9 and Powerpath failed - Unsupported device

[malaysiavm]

When I was try P2V SuSE Linux 9 running with EMC Powerpath to VM, I CANT detect any LUN's(EMC Clarion CX-380) as error show as below:

: Skipping unsupported device with path: /dev/md1, type: 0

: Parted returned device with path: /dev/emcpowerk, type: 0

: Skipping unsupported device with path: /dev/emcpowerk, type: 0

: Parted returned device with path: /dev/emcpowern, type: 0

: Skipping unsupported device with path: /dev/emcpowern, type: 0

: Parted returned device with path: /dev/emcpowerm, type: 0

: Skipping unsupported device with path: /dev/emcpowerm, type: 0

: Parted returned device with path: /dev/emcpowerl, type: 0

: Skipping unsupported device with path: /dev/emcpowerl, type: 0

: Parted returned device with path: /dev/emcpowerg, type: 0

: Skipping unsupported device with path: /dev/emcpowerg, type: 0

: Parted returned device with path: /dev/sdaw, type: 1

Does anyone have any idea about the issue? Please advice.

Thanks.

Jason

Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com

[vmweathers]

Software RAID is not supported by Linux P2V (see the release notes: http://www.vmware.com/support/converter/doc/releasenotes_conv40.html)

As for the emcpower* devices... I am not familiar with those. Some searching on the web leads me to believe it is usually used as an underlying block device for LVM. Is this how you are using it? (I cannot tell without more logs.) If it is just the backing for LVM volumes then the Linux P2V should succeed despite us not recognizing the underlying block device.

If the volume on software RAID is not critical (/boot or /) you should be able to just choose not to clone it in the Converter Wizard's 3rd page.

(If your question has been resolved please mark the answers as "Helpful" or "Correct".)

[malaysiavm]

Thanks .

This is not a software RAID or LVM. The /dev/emcpowerX is referring to individual partition sitting on physical server.

Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com

[vmweathers]

I am not familiar with /dev/emcpower (Powerpath), however the reason this does not work is that libparted does not recognize the device.

From what I have read online it seems this is some sort of volume manager, akin to LVM or VxVM, and thus we would need extra work to support it. It would help if you could point out some tutorial about how this device is used and how it relates to the underlying block devices.

(If your question has been resolved please mark the answers as "Helpful" or "Correct".)

[malaysiavm]

Thanks again...

Probably I should said software RAID/LVM used for local disk and EMC PowerPath Luns used without software RAID/LVM.

I hope I can update more details later which I had an open SR with VMware support.

Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com

[vmweathers]

Sorry, I am not entirely clear on what you mean by "Probably I should said software RAID/LVM used for local disk and EMC PowerPath Luns used without software RAID/LVM."

Sounds like you are saying that the local disk of the machine is using software RAID and LVM (these are separate things... LVM is supported on the source by Converter, and software RAID is not supported as I've noted previously, so if you have / or /boot on software RAID then you are out of luck and cannot expect to be able to use Linux P2V for this). Do you need these "EMC PowerPath Luns" to be cloned during Linux P2V conversion, or would you reconnect them to the target VM? If you plan to just reconnect them then you should be able to perform the conversion and reconnect them.

Also, I still have not heard from you what the actual failure was. Also which filesystems are mounted on which devices? The more detailed logs I hinted at needing earlier (as opposed to the snippet you posted) should reveal a lot of this...

(If your question has been resolved please mark the answers as "Helpful" or "Correct".)

[malaysiavm]

yes, the LUNs which presented with powerpath will require to be clone to the virtual machine together. When we tried to p2v the linux machine, all the mount point which presented by powerpath is not visible to be converted.

Example /test is attach with power path, but is not able to be converted during the p2v process. The file system could be either EXT3 or Reiserfs.

Jason

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[malaysiavm]

Just got a confirmation from VMware support team said that EMC PowerPath(both SLES or Redhat) is NOT officially support for the time being.

Jason

Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com

[vmweathers]

Thanks for bringing this scenario to our attention.

If we do eventually try to add support for EMC Powerpath storage devices on the source in Linux P2V, would you be willing to verify that our proposed changes work for your situation?

(If your question has been resolved please mark the answers as "Helpful" or "Correct".)

[malaysiavm]

Sure, that will be helpful to allow us to run the P2V with powerpath.

Jason

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[John_Crane]

Just to clear things up for people using this as a reference...

EMC Powerpath is dynamic multipathing software that provides failover and load balancing between multiple SAN paths.

I just ran into this same problem. The source volumes are actually detected by converter but they don't show up on the third page as devices to be duplicated on the new Virtual Machine.

You can view a listing of all the source volumes by clicking the "View source details..." link just below the "OS Family" box on the first page of the wizard.

It will list many more volumes than you actually have. That's because it see's each redundant path to a volume as a separate volume.

In my case I have 8 volumes configured with 4 paths to each volume. The source disk/volume report lists 32 volumes. I could probably just uninstall PowerPath but since I'm doing this as a trial it's not worth the time and effort. Converter is really cool. It's just too early in the development cycle to handle special configurations like this.

John C.

[Odurasler2]

Hello,

I had to P2V a 64bit Windows Server 2003 this past weekend that had LUNs on a Clariion. This physical server also had PowerPath installed. For some reason (maybe i was impatient) during the 'cold' clone process, the screen was indicating "Please Wait..." I waited well over 10min and decided that something wasn't right, so I performed the 'hot' clone process.

So here are my questions...

1. has anyone successfully P2V'd my configurations above?

2. if so, what are gotchas? (i received BSOD with mpio.sys error)

3. should i have waited longer for the cold clone process?

currently, after uninstalling powerpath through safe mode, i was getting another BSOD with 0x0000007b.