Vcenter Converter Mac

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Welcome to the VMware vCenter® Converter™ Standalone documentation page.

You can access the documentation in HTML by using the table of contents on the left side of the page.

Vcenter Converter Mac

Vmware Vcenter Converter Standalone 6.1.1

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Vcenter Converter Mac Address

The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone documentation provides information about installing and using vCenter Converter Standalone.

What's New in VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1

Download VMware vCenter Converter for Windows to automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions. VMware vCenter Converter Standalone lets you automate the process of converting physical machines to virtual machine for VMware virtualisation applications like Vmware ESX, ESXi, VMware Workstation, VMware player, etc. It supports multiple operating systems platforms including that of Windows Linux, Mac, Some Unix based systems like FreeBSD. Short description VMware vCenter Converter Standalone is a converter that is capable of switching Windows or Linux physical machines over to VMware virtual machines. Third party image formats can also be converted over to VMware virtual machines as well. More Popular downloads in System Utilities.

See vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 Release Notes.

Learn More About VMware vCenter Converter Standalone

Vcenter Converter Remote Machine

Converter

I recently switched from a big honkin’ Dell XPS ‘gaming’ desktop computer to an iMac with additional Thunderbolt monitor as my home rig. I added a G-Technology G-Speed Studio 12TB (9 usable under RAID 5) external storage array to store all my crap from the Dell. This is a very kick ass Thunderbolt-based disk array by the way; $2200 on Amazon currently: http://amzn.to/1BT3fzw

I buy a nice copy of VMware Fusion Pro 7 for Mac with the intent of virtualizing my old desktop since it still has some apps on it that I need, like Visio (WTF, can someone please develop a true Visio equivalent for Mac?). I want a true byte by byte image of my old Windows 7 system so all my metadata (drive perms, ownership, etc) is preserved. This meant using the VMware vCenter Converter to P2V it instead of the Fusion PC Migration thing.

I set up an SMB file share on my Mac mapped to my Fusion Virtual Machines folder on my RAID array. I map a drive to it from the Windows 7 box. I drag and drop about 20 gigs worth of files on the PC to the Mac since I wanted them native on the Mac anyway and I don’t plan to use Fusion’s folder sharing features; those came over nice and fast, no issues. Okay, the moment of truth, I fire up the vCenter Converter, select convert online machine, select local machine, accept the default options, hit Go.

Vcenter Converter Virtual Machine Version

Things are cruising along for a few minutes until I hit 5% and then I get this ugly error:

Vcenter Converter Mac

Digging around all over the internet for vmware-related converter failures, I find a TON of threads referencing bad blocks on the source side as being the cause of those. The general consensus is run a repair-enabled chkdsk command, reboot since it can’t do its things while the OS is running, run GUI-based, then run GUI-based disk defrag. I waste hours jumping through all of those hoops with no errors reported or repaired by the utilities.

Try again, no bueno. I find more posts online suggesting vCenter Converter sometimes screws up if you try to P2V a system with multiple drives, whether physical or logical. The suggestion in that case is do one conversion with the system volume, then another with the “C” drive and another for each additional drive that is mounted. After completion, you put all the vmdk’s back together in one folder and map them as additional drives into the initially converted machine before booting it up. I give that a try, and I get the same failure on even the standard system volume.

Vmware Vcenter Converter Standalone 5.5.3

So I start digging into the logs the converter produces; they’re really just more verbose versions of what I already saw in the GUI. This one is converter-gui-8.log for example:

Where I finally find something useful is in the zip file within the zip file named worker-diagnostics-task-1-rkc.zip, in a file called vmware-converter-worker-2.log:

Vmware vcenter converter local machine

Vcenter Converter Local Machine

Oooh, interesting, “‘There is not enough space on the file system for the selected operation’ (error code:13)“. Well how is that possible? My RAID array is nearly empty, so there’s almost 9 TB available and I’m only trying to P2V a 1 TB drive to it. I start digging around online and find some fairly old threads about the MacOS SMB service having a 2 gig file size limit, but that was in the 10.5 era when they bundled Samba without large file extensions, and supposedly that issue had been resolved long ago. Additionally, a couple files in that initial Windows 7 to Mac SMB share copy I did were larger than 2 gig, so I didn’t think that was the issue. I mess with perms, trying to give back world writable access to the share after setting it up, to the converter files after they start getting written, etc., but the same failure occurs at the same point each time. So who knows, maybe there still is some weird restriction on file size and when the converter tried to tell the Mac to allocate that 1 TB of space, it barfed.

In any case, after wasting hours trying to do this, I hooked a 2 TB USB drive to the Windows system a few hours ago and started converter, and now we’re at 13% with a 104 GB vmdk so far. All previous attempts with the MacOS SMB share died at 5%, so I think this one will be successful, just sucks waiting for 1 TB of data to write to a slow USB hard drive.

Vcenter Converter Machine

Hopefully this helps someone not waste a ton of time trying to P2V with a MacOS SMB share as the target, since it apparently won’t work.