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Applications and drivers that may not convert with virtual machines when using VMware Converter

Symptoms

After converting a physical machine using VMware Converter, you experience these symptoms:

  • The virtual machine may experience poor performance.
  • High CPU load maybe seen within the virtual machine.
  • The virtual machine may boot up slowly or takes a long time to log in.
  • Error messages from Service Control Manager in the Event Log indicate that services belonging to drivers are not working.
  • Networking in the virtual machine may not work.
  • The mouse may not work in the virtual machine.
  • The virtual machine may fail to boot with a black screen.
  • The boot loader on the virtual machine is corrupted or invalid.
  • The virtual machine may fail to boot and comes to a blue screen with the following error:

    STOP 0x1E KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

Resolution

When a physical source server contains certain device drivers that are dependent on hardware, which are then virtualized, it may prevent the resulting virtual machine from starting correctly (as the hardware is no longer present). 
 
Some applications, drivers, and utilities have known issues when they are installed in virtualized environments, but may work correctly on the source physical server.
 
Remove the following kinds of software prior to running VMware Converter on the source server:
  • Hardware specific software
    • Hardware-specific recovery tools or drivers
    • Some RAID management software (Intel Matrix RAID)
    • Software that installs hardware-dependent MBRs (Compaq proprietary software BIOS, some system recovery utilities)
    • IBM Open Systems Adapter (OSA) IPMI device driver (ipmi.sys)
    • Certain versions of IBM Director (twgsysin.sys)
    • usbsp.sys
    • SCSIPORT.SYS provided by Microsoft Windows 2000 SRP1 version 1
  • Software used to manage disks below the operating system
    • Disk overlays (Ontrack Disk Manager, EZDrive)
    • Disk roll-back software (Norton GoBack, Deep Freeze)
    • Disk compression (DriveSpace/DoubleSpace)
    • Disk encryption (DriveLock, DriveCrypt)
  • Applications with known issues:
    • Symantec pcAnywhere
    • Microsoft Virtual PC Additions (virtual machines only)
    • UPS Software. This has been known to cause issues after Conversion.
VMware recommends that these applications be removed from the source prior to running VMware Converter.
 
If it is not possible to remove the applications listed, try running a conversion.  If you are then unable to start the operating system successfully perform the following steps:  
  1. Start the Windows Recovery Console. For more information, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 314058.
  2. Rename or remove the offending driver files on the virtual machine, typically located in %systemroot%\system32 and %systemroot%\system32\drivers . 
  3. When completed type exit to quit the Recovery Console and restart the virtual machine.
  4. Start the operating system. After the operating system has started successfully, fully remove the problematic applications by using the uninstall methods for that application.

Additional Information

For more information related to troubleshooting applications drivers that prevent successful conversion:

Tags

operating-system  outdated-drivers  slow-guest-os-performance  slow-performance  vm-applications  vm-applications-fail

See Also

Update History

04/27/2011 - Minor formatting, updated title. Updated product versions.

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