Win 11-VM Import from Active Backup for Business not starting

[Rain66]

Hello, 

I'm not sure If you can help me. Maybe the issue is on the side of synology 

I have a physical Win 11-PC and I'm doing regular backups on my SynologyNAS using ActiveBackup for Business. There is a possibility to recover the backup of the entire Windows-machine as a VM in vSphere (ESXI 8.0.2). What I can say is,  the program (ActiveBackup for Business) is creating a vmx- and a vmdk-file to the selected datastore. 

So the first time I tried to start the VM in vSphere Client I ran into the known issue "EFI VMware attempting to start........unsuccessful"

So I changed the settings of the VM from UEFI to BIOS - after that I got the error "ACPI motherboard layout requires EFI. Failed to start the virtual machine". - I edited the vmx-file --> changing the value "acpi" to "i440bx". After that when I start the VM I'm getting "Operating System Not Found"...and here I'm stucked now....

Maybe it's a problem of the created vmx- and a vmdk-files....so I have to request help from the synology support

Or can you advise me before some simple steps???  

 

 

[pcgeek2009]

It seems to be a compatibility issue. Your first step was correct. On the second error, William Lam has written an article about how to resolve it. Manually updating the VMX file, while possible, is not recommended. He provides alternate instructions:

https://williamlam.com/2023/01/acpi-motherboard-layout-requires-efi-considerations-for-switching-vm-firmware-in-vsphere-8.html

Manually changing it is the second option. However, there is another step listed with commands that need to be ran after you manually update the file. Were these commands ran?

[Rain66]

I also read the the mentioned article of William Lam and I edited the vmx-file manually ...I did not use SSH...I edited the file with an editor and changed the value. I'm not that clever using SSH or Powershell...so only to see if it works I tried it editing my way (using an editor)....and finally the error message "ACPI motherboard layout requires EFI. Failed to start the virtual machine" was gone after doing this....so obviously it worked !?

Do you think the third error message ("Operating System Not Found") is related to the fact, that I edited the vmx-file in a different way ?

Update: I just managed successfully to recover a Win-10-PC in vSphere Client from the same Active Backup for Business-Backup (the Active Backup for Business-Backup contains several Win-10-machines, several Win11-Machines and one Windows Server 2019-Machine).

So obviously the issue is linked to the win-11-pc. First thing which looks different -->it was noticeable that, in contrast to the Win11 restore, two entries (here the PC "Anmeldung") were generated in the inventory list

This wasn't the case with the Win 11 PC (here the second entry was missing ("without parent element"),

Otherwise the VM started immediately - i.e. in UEFI mode and without having to make any changes to the VM's settings

[pcgeek2009]

I am not that familiar with Synology and Active Backup. I have mainly used Cohesity and Avamar prior to that. However, with a message like "missing parent element", it would indicate that something critically needed was not restored. So, that may be the cause for the VM not starting. You may want to check with Synology on what that error means in case it shows up in the future. I could not find anything specific on it.