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Thursday, January 6, 2011

“Unable to obtain hardware information for the selected machine” with vCenter Converter 4.x

I’ve been meaning to get some screenshots of this problem because I’ve been asked about this error a few times and since I had some P2V work tonight with a client that had the setup I needed, I took the opportunity to mimic this error on their vSphere environment.  Now before I proceed, please be aware that the reason to this error message in this blog post is only ONE of the MANY possibilities so if this does not apply to your situation, I would suggest that the converter logs be exported and parsed to determine the root cause.

Problem

You need to v2v a virtual machine currently sitting on a VMware Server 1.0 or 2.0 so you proceed with logging into vCenter with the vCenter Converter installed, right click on your cluster, choose Import and then choose VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine for the Select source type field.  You browse to the network path for the vmx file, enter the credentials to connect to the share but once you click on View source details, you receive the following error:

Unable to obtain hardware information for the selected machine

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Resolution

One of the reasons why you would get this error is if the virtual machine is powered on.  This conversion process requires the source to be powered off and if you would like to virtualize it live, you should install the converter agent on the virtual machine and live clone it.  Once you’ve shutdown the virtual machine, you should see something similar to the following:

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For further troubleshooting, you can click on the Export diagnostic logs… link at the bottom left hand corner to extract a zip package with line by line information about the failure.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

restarting the management agent from the vsphere console helped me with this particular error (the vm was already off in my case)

Anonymous said...

In my case it was because the esx server was v. 3.5 and the vcenter server was 2.5. I was using 5.0 converter. In the converter instead of connecting through the vcenter server I went directly to the ip of the esx server using root account.

'TGroov said...

For the post . . . esx server was v 3.5 and the vcenter server was 2.5 . . .

How did you connect directly, and what did you use to connect to the esx directly?

Anonymous said...

I had this error with a VM that was provided to me on disk (i.e. I had no way to go back and shut down the vm prior to copying).

To fix it I had to edit the base vmdk file to correct the file paths within to the correct s001, s002 etc files. This resolved the issue for me.