Last week I encountered some issues with converting a Hyper-V 2008 R2 virtual machine to VMware vSphere 5.5 using VMware Converter 6.0.

Before attempting the conversion I first disabled SSL encryption within VMware Converter (kb.vmware.com/kb/2020517) to help improve the conversion speed. I then proceeded to configure VMware Converter using the default settings for the source and destination VMs.

The converter process started OK however at 33% completion the job had failed with the following error: “An error occurred during the conversion: ‘The operation experienced a network error’“.

At this point I had also noticed that my destination ESXi host had also disconnected from vCenter. After a few minutes the host began to respond and I had noticed it too had an error, “/sbin/hostd crashed (1 time(s) so far) and a core file might been create at /var/core/hostd-worker-zdump.000. This might have caused connections to the host to be dropped.”

A quick search of the VMware Knowledgebase did not reveal a solution however I did find an article to assist in troubleshooting issues with VMware Converter (kb.vmware.com/kb/1004588).

I isolated the conversion job to a single standalone VMware ESXi destination host (rather than vCenter), however I continued to experience the same issue.

I exported the logs for both the ESXi host and VMware converter, neither were very forthcoming with identifying the issue. This was the best I could get from the VMware Converter logs

After a quick check, I noticed that the source VM had two virtual disks, with multiple partitions on the second virtual disk.

Since I was using the default settings, VMware Converter was also attempting to create the destination VM with the same two virtual disks.

Using VMware Converter I reconfigured the destination VM to split the source partitions into multiple virtual disks. From the Data copy type drop-down box, click ‘Select volumes to copy‘ and then click ‘Advanced…‘

Add a new virtual disk for each volume partition. Click ‘Add Disk‘.

Select each partition and move up or down to associate with the new virtual disks you have added. Continue to configure the converter job as required.

SUCCESS!

After reconfiguring the virtual disks on the destination VM the conversion completed without an issue.

Finally, a quick shout-out to my work colleague Andy Ramsay for his assistance with resolving this issue.

Update (24/09/2015) – I discovered that Brian Graf has produced an automated script to disable SSL encryption within VMware Converter. Be sure to check out his blog post here to download the script.