Converting P2V of a Windows 2000 Server to vSphere 6.X

It's a shame but I recently had to P2V a Windows 2000 server, part of our legacy services, in order to free up and decomm an old physical server. It was not a pleasure at all :(

Planning

1) Download and keep VMware Converter 4.0.1 (VMware-converter-4.0.1-161434.exe) – To P2V Windows 2000

P2V Converter 4.0.1 doesn’t support any vCenter/ ESXi later than 4.x. So I ended up in installing ESXi 4.0 on a VM running on top of my vSphere 6.5 infra!

So 2) ESXi 4.0 ISO

I read articles of people using VMware WorkStation for this, but in my case I didn’t want the export job to run outside datacentre, due to security reasons.

My Windows 2000 Server that I need to virtualize is 200 Gig. So if you look at the disk size of ESXi VM, I made sure that It’s bigger than that. 

 

 

3) Check Patch Level of Windows 2000 server and make sure

> It’s updated to SP4 Rollup 1 (KB891861)

If not, install from here and reboot the server before running P2V job

4) Download and keep VMware Converter 6.0.0 (VMware-converter-en-6.0.0-2716716.exe) – To move Virtual machine from ESX 4.0 to vCenter 6.X

5) vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp For troubleshooting - https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/100520

Steps I followed

1. 1)      Installed ESX4.0 on my VM that I created, configured it with an IP that is accessible from Windows 2000 server and also from my PROD 6.x vCenter
   2)      Installed Converter 4.0.1 on the Windows 2000 machine
   3)      Started P2V Conversion of the Windows 2000 machine to the virtual ESX 4.1
   Make sure you select  “SCSI” as Disk Controller and not “Preserve Source”
   
   
   4)      Once the conversion is complete, we now have the VM inside ESX 4. However as this is a nested setup, we can’t power on and test it.
   5)      Install VMware Converter 6.0.0 on a machine that has access to the ESXi 4 VM and your PROD vCenter. We will use V2V on this converter version to move the VM to our PROD 6.5
   Not tested with 6.7, but worst case, we can also download the files from the datastore and move to PROD vCenter!
   6)      Once done, power on and test.
   
   
   
   

You can then take a backup and do R&D stuff to keep VMware tools and Hardware up to date J

Issues that I’ve seen

BSOD with “KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED” error while loading windows.

This usually happens if you haven’t installed the SP4 Rollup 1 (KB891861) on the source VM.

I could fix it, without having to re-run P2V. Steps below

1. 1)      Detach the C:\ Disk from the Windows 2000 VM where you see this issue after P2V
   2)      Connect this disk to any of your existing Windows VMs.
   3)      Go to disk management and bring the disk online and assign a drive letter
   4)      Use 7 Zip and Extract KB891861 and vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp that we’ve downloaded.
   Look for scsiport.sys under KB891861 extract – version 5.00.2195.7059
         And for vmscsi.sys under vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp extract – version 1.2.0.4 
   
   
          Make sure the versions are correct. 
   
   
   5)  Copy these two files to the VM where we have the disk attached.

1. 6)      Navigate to WINNT\System32\drivers and rename existing scsiport.sys and vmscsi.sys to “–old”
   7)      Copy the two new files.
   8)      Bring disk offline and move it back to Windows 2000 VM
   9)      Double check and make sure that the SCSI controller type is “BusLogic Parallel”
   10)   Power on the VM to test!
   
   

 

Modifying vSphere Web Client and HTML5 Client session timeout – VCSA 6.X

vSphere and HTML clients comes with a 120 minutes timeout.

For our Non-PROD infra we decided to set it to 24 hrs which is 1440 in minutes.

below are the steps

1) SSH to VCSA

If SSH is not enabled, you may do it from Appliance Management Page

Access it at VCSA-IP:5480

3) Below are the config file locations for vSphere 6.5 and 6.7

Web Client – /etc/vmware/vsphere-client/

HTML5 Client – /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/

4) Config file name is “webclient.properties“. You need to open this file and look for “session.timeout” and change  value to your desired time out value in minuted. For me it’s 1440, which is 24 Hrs like I mentioned.

vi /etc/vmware/vsphere-client/webclient.properties

Do the same for  HTML5 client at

vi /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/webclient.properties

5) Now it’s time to restart services for the change to take affect.

service-control –stop vspherewebclientsvc

service-control –stop vsphere-client

service-control –start vspherewebclientsvc

service-control –start vsphere-client

Done! 

ESXi 6.5 - VMware tools 10.3 BSOD issue with Windows 2012 and higher with hardware version 13

Windows 2012 and higher versions with VMware tools 10.3X version with hardware version 13 (and of-course running on 6.5 ESXi) are pron to a BSOD issue

I got the same results when I tested it my lab.

BSOD would say "bad_pool_caller".

VMware this morning released KB recalling whole 10.3 family of tools. Check below links

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/57796
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tools/10.3/rn/vmware-tools-1030-release-notes.html

Recommendation is to remove it completely and install last stable build, which is 10.2.5

Email alerts stopped after vCenter 6 to 6.5 upgrade

Upgraded out vCenter from 6.0 Appliance to 6.5 Appliance last week.
It was one of my smoothest experience with vCenters all these time. Having said that, after two days I realised that the email alerts stopped working. We had same issues when we upgraded 5.5 Windows to 6.0 Appliance and same thing happened. We had to go though a bunch of manual config changes to get it working below is the KB and worth checking
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2073849
I was afraid that it's the same case again, but to my surprise it was not the case here.

If you are experiencing slimier issues, follow below steps

1) Open vSphere Web Client
2) Click on vCenter and Click on Configure at the right side
3) Under Settings -> General Click Edit
4) Click on Mail
5) Cut the Mail Server (same in a notepad if required) and type something else there (may be check@email.com) and click OK to same
6) Edit again and replace the Mail server with the actual SMTP FQDN that you cut earlier.

Boom!!

All the emails started flowing to my inbox again and there were a lot of them. Looks like they were queued.

Give it a try... All the best....

vCenter 6.5 Upgrade - The managing vCenter Server instance is the same as the source vCenter Server Appliance that you want to upgrade......

The managing vCenter Server instance is the same as the source vCenter Server Appliance that you want to upgrade.

But then the issue is that the stage 2 of the installer wont let you edit the config there. 

Fix

1) Close the Setup and you will get a message that you can continue the install by going to https://<vcenter>:5480

2) Copy the link

3) Open a new browser and paste the link

4) Click on Upgrade 

5) Type in root password of the new 6.5 appliance and continue Stage 2 of the upgrade, by entering host name of the ESXi host where VM reside and credentials.