Sometimes we may come across a Virtual Appliance or Virtual Machine, which has been developed and tested for VMware Server 2.0.2, VMware Workstation or VMware Player that we would like to use on VMware vSphere 4.x or 5.0. In this example I’m using Open Computers and Software Inventory Next Generation. The VMs supplied have been developed and tested with VMware Server and VMware Player.
Only issue is, when we try to turn on the Virtual Appliance, we get the error message “Failed to open disk scsi0:0: Unsupported or invalid disk type 7. Ensure that the disk has been imported.” – in VMware vSphere 4.x or 5.0.
It’s possible that the virtual appliance virtual disk is probably monolithicSparse, and ESXi only works with pre-allocated disk (monolithicFlat).
No issue just use VMware Converter Standalone to convert the appliance or virtual machine.
This is my first outing with VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0, oddly the earlier version 4.3, will not import into ESXi 5.0, it produces a General Fault. The vConverter for vCenter works okay with ESXi 5.0, but not the standalone version.
Rather than a lot of words, here’s a quick video demonstration of the Conversion. So VMware Converter has more uses than just P2V tool!
[flv:https://andysworld.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/vmdk.flv 480 360]
