Comments on: Restoring VCB Full Backups with VMware Converter

By: RyanC

RyanC — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 04:59:59 +0000

Hi Ryan

Thanks mate for your reply. Worked fine for me.

Cheers

By: husar

husar — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:50:30 +0000

It works fine with VMware-converter-4.0.1-161434.exe. But not with version 3.0.3 and 4.3.0

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:46:53 +0000

There is a way you can restore VCB backups directly through Virtual Center without having to use converter. Here are the steps:

1) Copy the VCB backup folder to you SAN or ESX local storage
2) In Virtual Center browse the datastore that you copied the folder to.
3) Open the folder for the VM you want to restore and right click the .vmx file. Choose Add to Inventory
4) A dialog will open. Complete the wizard by specifying an ESX host in the new production cluster.
5) Right click the newly added VM and choose Edit Settings
6) Set the Network Adapter VLAN to the correct Network Label
7) Document the number of hard drives. As you will notice the restored drives do not show up with the correct space at first. You will need to re-add each drive one by one as shown in the next step
Click Remove on each of the hard drives.
9) Click Add
10) Choose Hard Disk
12) Select “Use an existing virtual disk”
13) Browse to the datastore where this VM lives and locate the vmdk. Click OK on all open Windows.
14)Repeat this process to add each drive if there was more than one in step 7.
15) Now clone the VM with a new name. This cloning process restores all the 2GB VCB backup files into a single VMDK.
16) Power up the clone and it is good to go!

By: Des

Des — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:20:10 +0000

Can you just upload the folder of the fullvm into the datatstorage and run the VM without going through VMConvertor?

By: Jessica Tanenhaus

Jessica Tanenhaus — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:59:23 +0000

For those of you who may also be doing this at late hours with little to no sleep, the index file referenced in step 3 is “catalog”; I’m using a VCB full backup from an ESX 3.5 server.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:05:31 +0000

Can you script the VMConverter functionality?

By: Sam

Sam — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 13:12:51 +0000

vmware converter Unable to determine Guest Operating System

It took me over an hour to find this solution.

Unplug your USB disk.
Thats it. After this my XP was able to determine Guest Operating System.
None of the other clues helped. I edited my boot.ini file, no help.
I edited the .vmx & .vmdk files, no help.

This solution is pretty lame though since my .vmx image just happened to be in the USB drive.

sigh