Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Virtual Iron > XenServer Raw LUN Server Conversion

Several of our Virtual Iron VMs where created without making a virtual storage disk and where mounted as raw LUNs instead. Servers without a virtual storage disk in VI can't be exported via the VI gui.

For this I ran a P2V conversion using XenConvert v2.0.1.


  1. Log into the server needing converted.
  2. Install XenConvert
  3. Remove Virtual Iron Tools and reboot
  4. From "This Machine (machine name)" To "Xen Virtual Appliance"
  5. Select the disk to convert and a location to store the conversion. In order to get this to work I had to map a network drive to the server with a drive of E (C for local disk and D for cdrom). According to the XenConvert guide this is a known issue.
  6. Conversion took a long time on a 20GB drive. This was due to it pulling the drive into a .vhd and then converting the .vhd into XVA.
  7. Import the ova.xml the same as outlined in Virtual Iron > XenServer Conversion

Important: the initial boot of the server was fine, but after a shutdown I began to receive the error "NT Detect Failed" when booting. I was able to fix this by booting to the installation CD and running a repair (R). Once at the prompt I ran chkdsk /r which resolved the issue

Note: I found it extremely important to remove the VI Tools before the conversion. Otherwise a lot of issues would begin on the second boot of the VM.

2 comments:

  1. I have had the same experience as you Aaron. Of course Citrix's XenConverter documentation also suggests you need at least an equal amount of space for conversion. I have also had the same issues with converted virtual machines not booting on second boot regardless of the platform I am converting from. So far, the solution for me was to not only remove any virtualization tools installed but also to reboot before running the XenConverter. This was regardless of whether it was any version of Windows.

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