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I need to migrate some VMware guests to new hardware. We're using vSphere Hypervisor and not having much success.

I'm attempting to use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone to migrate a 10GB Ubuntu guest from an ESXi 4.0.0 host to an ESXi 4.1.0 host. After running for two hours and reporting only 3% progress the conversion failed.

The process was reporting progress at around 20KB/sec. I checked for network problems between the two servers by copying a 1GB file from a guest on one to a guest on the other via scp. This showed >10MB/sec transfer rate (with ssh compression disabled) which didn't indicate the problem was networking between the two hosts.

The converter logs are here: https://gist.github.com/870379

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Why are you trying to use VMware Converter for this? If you have shared storage and the necessary licenses, you should be able to do a VMotion between hosts. Alternatively, if these are two standalone ESXi servers, then you can shut down the guest on the 4.0 box, use scp to copy the files to the vmfs on the new server, re-add to inventory there and then start it up.

Note: to do the above, you'll need to enable ssh (a.k.a. remote tech support mode) on both hosts. This used to be unsupported by VMware, but is now (thankfully) a fully-supported option.

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    Agreed. Running VMware Converter on a VM is akin to using remote desktop on a computer to connect to itself.
    – Hyppy
    Mar 17, 2011 at 3:16
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    Thanks ErikA. I did not know about enabling SSH/SCP and was not sure whether guests on 4.0 would work on a 4.1 host. Mar 17, 2011 at 3:38
  • Yep - they should work just fine. Good luck! Once ssh'ed in, just $ cd /vmfs/volumes and you'll see your datastore.
    – EEAA
    Mar 17, 2011 at 3:43
  • Is there any reason for me not to use TSM all the time? Personally I would feel much more comfortable using ssh and scp than the GUI tools but VMware seem to advise against using TSM except in unusual circumstances. bit.ly/c4cguS Mar 17, 2011 at 3:45
  • The TSM on ESXi is very stripped-down. There's not a whole lot you can do in there - I mostly use it for file management. For CLI stuff, I'd recommend looking into either the VCLI product or alternatively their PowerCLI (powershell) cmdlets. I'm a linux guy through and through, but I find their powershell commands to be very nice for managing things.
    – EEAA
    Mar 17, 2011 at 3:47

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