Although using VMware vCenter Converter is normally a breeze. Further, I have converted many Windows 7 machines before and imported them to vSphere without a glitch. I had an interesting task the other day of converting a Dell PC running Windows 7 to a virtual machine running on vSphere 5. The task seemed to me as tedious as converting any windows physical machine to a virtual machine & I have fired VMware vCenter Converter and ran the converting process as usual. One thing that I did not give much attention to was that the Dell PC had some kinda of a recovery partition which has caused the VM not to run properly after the conversion has completed.

As soon the conversion has complete I have noticed it has been completed with an error about the recovery partition failing to be assigned a partition letter. I have decided to ignore the error and run the VM and see what happen. Powering on the VM It did not detect a boot disk and was just trying to boot from the network. This was kinda a bad start, but after fuzzing a bit with VM I have discovered that the Windows partition is not set to a primary partition.… Read More

I am sorry if this is too obvious for some of you, but it seems not obvious to most of my customers. Every few days I get the following question from my customers, which I will try to briefly answer in this post.

Where can I find vmware vCenter converter in VMware vCenter 4?

Unfortunately, unlike most other VMware feature the VMware vCenter Converter does not have any obvious shortcut in vCenter.  To start vCenter converter in Virtual Center you will need to follow the below steps:

1. Make sure you are in host & clusters view.
2. Choose one of your hosts or clusters in vCenter
3. From the top drop down menu choose one of the following paths depend on if you have chosen a host or cluster in step 2.

Inventory ==> Host ==> Import Machine

Inventory ==> Cluster ==> Import Machine

The image below demonstrate the above steps:

I hope this help few VMware admins out there, & sorry if it was too easy for many of the other gurus out there. I believe most the usage steps of VMware vcenter converter is quite obvious & very well documented on the web. Please leave a comment if this help, or if you require any further help.… Read More