saliano.net » Sysadmin http://saliano.net Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:11:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 MSSQL Server Conversion with VMWare Converter http://saliano.net/2011/06/03/mssql-server-conversion-with-vmware-converter/ http://saliano.net/2011/06/03/mssql-server-conversion-with-vmware-converter/#comments Fri, 03 Jun 2011 03:16:31 +0000 matt http://saliano.net/?p=1163 I ran into an issue with VMWare converter hanging while in block conversion mode while trying to virtualize an instance of Microsoft SQL server. It turns out that it’s a known issue in version 4.3 of the standalone converter. My conversion was hanging due to the cluster size of some disks being larger than 4k. It’s very common to use 64k cluster sizes for SQL data volumes and converter was completely hung up while trying to convert those disks. Thankfully there is a workaround.

First you’ll have to stop the conversion by closing converter and stopping the vmware converter services. Then remove the partially imported virtual machine giving you a clean slate from which to start.

To determine which disks are affected run the following command as an administrative user on each drive of the target you’re converting to determine if “Bytes Per Cluster” is larger than 4096:

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:

If “Bytes Per Cluster” is larger than 4096, you can force a file level copy by reducing the volume size for each volume affected. In my case I simply recreated my conversion task and reduced each affected volume by one gigabyte.

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