Saturday, June 13, 2009

vCenter Converter Standalone 4 - ports used

We're doing quite a few P2V conversions at the moment, and that means that we see all kinds of weird errors, conversion failures, and connection issues. P2V is definitely not an exact science.

One thing that is recommended to have in order is that proper network ports are opened.

VMware has written a good KB article that explains which ports are used.

If you have server with Converter Standalone installed on it, and you have trouble connecting to the source physical computer, then first make sure that Windows Firewall is disabled. If that doesn't work, then install the Converter application directly on the source computer. Then you will need outbound 443 TCP connection to vCenter (former Virtual Center) (it's assumed that port 443 TCP is open inbound on the vCenter server, of course).

To test if ports are open, open a CMD prompt and run following command:

telnet 'vCenter ip' 443

(without the ' ') If the DOS prompt goes black, then the connection is good. Othervise you will get a 'can't connect' or something similar)

If you P2V directly to an ESX server, then ports 902, 903, and 443 TCP are used.

If you, for some reason, can't get port 443 opened, then a workaround is as follows:

  • Install the Converter directly on the source system
  • If you have an existing test VM in the same IP range, then create a new disk and attach that to the test VM.
  • Make a Windows share on the new disk
  • From the Converter choose to export to standalone virtual machine in Workstation format and then coose to place files on the share just created
  • After export, change the VLAN to an IP range that doesn't have any firewalls blocking
  • Import the VM from within vCenter

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