vmware converter - Mike Tabor

How to convert VMDK to OVF file format

January 27, 2020February 4, 2020 VMware

Here is a quick and easy way to convert a VMDK to OVF file format using the OVF Tool from VMware.

First download and install the VMware OVF Tool for your operating system.
Open a command prompt as Administrator and navigate to the OVF Tool install directory:
```
cd C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool
```
Next, type in the following command to convert VMDK to OVF:
```
ovftool.exe \virtualmachine.vmx \virtualmachine.ovf
```

After a few minutes time you should you should see a “Transfer Completed, Completed successfully” message and your VMDK to OVF file conversion is complete and ready for use.
convert vmdk to ovf complete

How to fix VMware Converter error “FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored”

April 24, 2018 VMware

2 Comments

While moving some VM’s from Hyper-V to VMware using VMware Converter a VM failed to convert with the error: FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored.

FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored because there is not enough space on the source volumes or because the source machine does not have any NTFS volumes. Error code: 2147754783 (0x8004231F).

Come to find out the System Reserved partition was full. Our soon to be retired Appassure backup application was nice enough to fill up the volume.

Luckily Appassure is being replaced by Veeam and fixing the above VMware Converter error is an easy fix.

How-to fix VMware Converter error FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.

April 10, 2018 VMware

3 Comments

I was recently tasked with migrating a Hyper-V machine to our VMware environment. However, each time VMware Converter was ran, the task would fail at 97% with an error “FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.“.

Looking further into the virtual machine there were a number of concerns I had on the VM. One such issue which I believe might be causing the above error, is that the system volume drive was on drive 0 while the “C:” drive was on drive 1. Whereas these are typically on the same drive in most Windows installs.

Below are the steps I took to fix this VM and made the migration from Hyper-V to VMware a success.

VMware P2V Permission to perform this operation was denied fix

July 27, 2017 VMware

12 Comments

Just the other day we had a Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard physical server that needed to be P2V’ed, and after trying to use VMware Converter Standalone 6.1.1 we ran into the error message “Permission to perform this operation was denied” after entering the source machine details.

Even after trying to start VMware Converter as “Run as administrator” the error persisted. Below is the workaround we performed to quickly allow us to P2V the physical server.