Success! Intuition.

My P2V finally ran to completion in some small hour of the morning. I haven’t had time to boot it up yet but that is certainly good progress.

I don’t have any detailed technical explanation of why it finally worked but following my intuition, call it guesswork, got me through. Not ideal but there’s plenty of room for creativity in IT.

My initial attempt, after chopping out the NAS datastore (QNAP), VC Appliance and a bunch of services from my source machine, failed at 31% with a blue screen. The only change I made was to unplug a USB DVD writer and try again, at which point it ran to completion.

I will include a screenshot later.

My next steps will be to storage vmotion the target to the NAS, grow the disk (which was thin an minimal spec.) and see how it performs, assuming it works at all.

Danger – Cloud at Work

No blogs for a while, I’m afraid, not due to lack of topics but lack of (priority of) time. I have recently started working on a major cloud project at a large investment bank in the City (of London). This is using vCloud Director and some other nascent products from VMware. All very interesting and challenging and I certainly hope to blog about it when I have the time!

Fixed esxi datastore config

Happily I found the reference to the datastore which I clobbered and have removed it from the file on the USB stick. Given the error messages in my earlier post, it is clear that something remembered that datastore. A manual browse didn’t turn anything up (but was interesting for other reasons) so I tried the following command to search all files for a portion of the datastore ID:

~ # find / -type f -exec egrep 4c17e548 {} \; -print
/vmfs/volumes/4c17e548-9da6c4fd-ff79-001b215b7069/.locker 0
/etc/vmware/locker.conf
^C

And yes the file looks like:

~ # ls -l /etc/vmware/locker.conf
-rw-r--r-T   1 root     root           60 Jun 18 17:29 /etc/vmware/locker.conf

Removing the file makes esxi forget about that datastore and boot in normal time.

I am even more convinced that it is possible to make a USB datastore now that I can see that the USB stick which boots vSphere has vmfs portions on it. Consequently I am going to persevere on that for a bit.