Friday, May 23, 2008

MS Virtual Server to VMware ESX Migration Issue

Last week, I was trying to migrate some virtual guest servers from MS Virtual Server 2005 environment to VMware ESX. I had to run the "import" task three times to achieve a successful migration, and had to spend 4-5 hours for a simple migration operation. Hope the tips here will save you some time.
At my first attempt, the process seemed to halt at 22%. There was no activity in the Virtual Center and there were no log file entries at the VMware side. I examined the event viewer logs of the Virtual Server 2005 guest machine and found that the following error was logged:
Log Name: System
Source: msvmscsi
Date: 5/15/2008 5:14:45 PM
Event ID: 9
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: xxx-xxx.xxx.xxx
Description:The device, \Device\Scsi\msvmscsi1, did not respond within the timeout period.

A quick Google search directed me to this link:
http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=9&eventno=9355&source=vmscsi&phase=1
Before my second attempt I created the following value as described in the above link, and rebooted the guest server:
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Disk
Sub Key: TimeOutValue
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 03c hex (or 60 decimal)

The import process ran up to 97% in my second attempt, then halted there. Same error messages were displayed in the event log of the guest machine.
Before the third attempt, I decided to increase the same registry key value as follows and rebooted the guest server:
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Disk
Sub Key: TimeOutValue
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 05a hex (or 90 decimal)
After this final change and reboot, third import attempt ran successfully. As a final step, I removed the registry setting at the ESX guest machine since it is no longer needed.