Linux – VMware vCenter Converter – P2V Linux Machine

linuxvmware-esxivmware-vcentervmware-vsphere

I'm trying to do P2V with a Debian powered-on source. Everything works perfectly up until the point of selecting destination.

It states that the destination type is VMware Infrastructure virtual machine.

It asks for the server details and along the right it states that supported VMware Infrastructure products include VMware vCenter Server 2.0, 2.5 and 4.0. Great, I thought, because I'm running VMware vCenter Server 4.0.1 on this machine.

So I try to specify the details of my machine but I get any one of a few errors:

  • Timeout
  • Unable to recognise the server type or version
  • Target machine actively refused the connection

What confuses me the most is that I'm using the same details of the server I connected to in the first place, therefore I know that it can connect to the server and it is running.

The server is running on my laptop, the agent is running on the Linux machine. I get this same error whether I use the client on my laptop or the Linux machine itself!

Any ideas? Do I need another product running to be the 'destination'?

Best Answer

The problem is that you are converting a linux based server, those can only be done to an ESX/ESXi machine. What I did to get mine done was download the free ESXi 4 from vmware then install that on a VM, its quick to do. Then you use that as your destination. After that its pretty simple to do the conversion.