Conversion fails - Failed to take snapshot of source volume.

[tgatesnc]

I'm trying to take a VMware image of our Exchange server for testing a migration. When I try to start the converter it fails right away with this error message.

ERROR: Failed to take snapshot of a source volume. Possible causes include not having any NTFS volumes on Windows XP or Windows 2003 source systems, and not having enough disk space.

The source is a Windows 2000 SP4 STD server running Microsoft Exchange 5.5

All drives are NTFS

C drive (system drive) 7.79 gig 3.04 gig free - local disk

D drive (not used and not attempting to convert) 9.12 gig 9.04 gig free - local disk

E drive (not used and not attempting to convert) 67.8 gig 64.1 gig free - local disk

F drive (exchange log drive) 9.99 gig 9.88 gig free - SAN drive

G drive (Exchange databases) 149 gig 34.4 gig free - SAN drive

Destination is:

Windows 2003 SP2 STD server running ESX server

All drives are NTFS

C drive (system drive) 16.8 gig 11.6 free - local disk

D drive (VMware data drive) 838 gig 775 gig free - local disk

Some things I intend to try tonight per suggestions on this board are:

Reinstall the agent using the local administrator account. I installed it originally using a domain admin account.

Reboot the server. I was not prompted to reboot after installing the agent but from the posts I can see that this is important on Windows 2000.

I have seen posts referring to VSS services ect but I don't see any of these services running on my source server? What services are required for a successful converion of this server? This server does have Vertias Backup Exec 8.x and HP insight software installed as well.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[theanykey]

this is your initial issue:

destination: D drive (VMware data drive) 838 gig 775 gig free - local disk

As per the default install of a VMFS 3.x volume, the 1mb blocksize limits the maximum size of a file to no more then 256gb.

The other concern is running exchange in a VM. I would assume since you already have it configured directly to a SAN that you may want to further investigate RDM.

From the Configuration maximums guide:

=======================================

VMFS 2

Volume size (2TB x number of extents) (Minimum = 100MB)

File size (block size=1 MB) 456GB

File size (block size=8 MB) 2TB

File size (block size=64MB) 27TB

File size (block size=256MB) 64TB

Number of files per volume 256 + (64 x number of extents)

VMFS 3

Volume size (block size = 1MB) ~16TB 4GB (denotes an approximate value)

Volume size (block size = 2MB) ~32TB 8GB

Volume size (block size = 4MB) ~64TB 16GB

Volume size (block size = 8MB) 64TB

File size (block size=1MB) 256GB

File size (block size=8MB) 2TB

[tgatesnc]

The destination drive is less that 150 gigs for this server. The total disk space available is 775 gig. Will that work? The disks for the Exchange server are all under 150 gig.

This server is never to be used in production so I wasn't too concerned about performance. What we are planning to do is upgrade our Existing Windows NT domain and Exchange 5.5 environment to Windows 2003 domain and Exchange 2003. Then eventually upgrade from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.

These servers that I'm using the VMware converter for are not for production. Only to test the migration before we attempt to migrate the existing "iron" servers to "new iron" servers.

[theanykey]

unless you specify to resize it to a smaller size, it will make it the same as the entire partition. Assuming youre using the default 1mb vmfs blocksize. keep it under 256gb. You may want to try each partition 1 by 1 to see if its a specific partition holding you back.

Check the size of the VM being created on the LUN - is it growing during the conversion?

[tgatesnc]

No, the files in the target VM directory do not seem to be growing. If it isn't actually copying, I wonder what all the disk activity is? There are not any VM's running right now.

I guess I could try to monitor the network traffic and look for the source.

Just to clarify, the source disks are no larger than 150 gig and I told it to resize the target machine down to about 120 gig at the largest so the disk size should not be the issue. The large size I mentioned earlier is just the available space on the VMware server.

Also, the LUN is on the production Exchange server. The target VMware server only has local SCSI storage.

Thank you,

[tgatesnc]

I uninstalled and reinstalled the agent using the local administrator account last night. Then I rebooted the server and started the conversion process.

It has now been nearly 12 hours and it appears to still be running. There is a lot of disk activity on the target drive. The console shows 96% complete and 4 min remaining but it has said that since atleast 7:30am this morning.

Is there a way I can tell if it is still working? I looked in the vmware-temp directory on the source server and there is a txt file in there dated today that updates every 15 min or so. Does that show that it is still progressing? I know that it wil take quite awhile to copy 100 + gigs of data. Luckily we are not experiencing any performance problems with the production source server.

Thanks for your input..

[theanykey]

What happens if you only convert the C drive?

i would need to see the logs...

Could its be Exchange locking files?

Could it be allot of NFC (network file copy) errors?

also, do you have any software/hardware mirrors or raids?

[tgatesnc]

Sorry it took me so long to respond. I found the resolution.

The source server is Windows 2000. Though it did not say that it needed to reboot after installing the agent. We went ahead and rebooted it. After the reboot the conversion worked fine.

Thank you.

[JamesCampbell]

I have an old Compaq ProLiant server running W2K SP4 and was having the same error above when trying to do a convert straight from the physical server to my ESX cluster.

Your suggestion of uninstalling, reinstalling the agent as Local Administrator (Not domain administrator) and doing a reboot seems to have worked a charm. Oh and the Checkdisk. My disk was in a bad state.

Thanks a million

[dwalker-isi]

I had the same issue on a Windows 2000 server and by installing the VMware converter installation (just the Agent) and rebooting, the conversion process could get past the 2% error message. I just noticed that a message indicates to reboot if installing agent on a Windows 2000 OS.

Now we have a different issue where the VM conversion goes through all the way to 97% and gets stuck there with these messages: I have seen this when a different Citrix server was being converted and could never get past the error.

05:44:05 PM Step 1 : Connecting to VMware Converter Agent on ares

05:44:05 PM Step 2 : Creating target virtual machine and importing data

05:44:10 PM Configuring parameters for the target virtual machine...

05:44:13 PM WARNING: Dropping serial ports: Maximum number of 4 serial ports has been reached. Only 4 serial ports will be migrated.

05:44:13 PM Creating target virtual machine...

05:44:23 PM Taking a snapshot of the volume...

05:44:23 PM Cloning source volume c: into target virtual machine...

06:24:04 PM Formatting target volume e:...

06:25:01 PM Taking a snapshot of the volume...

06:25:01 PM Cloning source volume e: into target virtual machine...

06:42:46 PM Updating boot sectors...

06:42:52 PM Skipping boot.ini update...

06:42:52 PM Adjusting drive letter mappings...

06:42:58 PM Step 3 : Preparing target virtual machine

06:43:48 PM ERROR: Unknown error returned by VMware Converter Agent