I wish I had been told about the caveats of importing your old VMware Workstation or Server virtual machines into ESX. VMware always talks about how portable their virtual machines are. They aren’t lying, but once you switch to ESX, it’s not nearly as easy as it is with all of their other products.
I had a few Ubuntu or Debian virtual machines that I had been running on VMware Server. I also tried to copy my Windows XP virtual machine template to the ESX host. No dice. But why?
VMware ESX does not support virtual machine disk files that are IDE. You may only use SCSI disk files with ESX.
There’s not even an official migration or conversion path from IDE to SCSI, or even a reasonable unsupported one.
I wish that fact would have been posted somewhere. I’ve been using VMware Workstation for a long time now and I’ve never read about the IDE disk problem with ESX.
Now I did have a SCSI disk based virtual machine, and it imported pretty easily.
Update: I found two sites to try. I’ll update again if they actually work.
Fingers crossed.