I cover that in this linked post.īased on the output of the mount command from the top, start mounting things into the /mnt directory. Note: We will deal with some long random values, I recommend starting an SSH session on your live environment and doing this stuff through there. Start with booting your new VM with the Debian Live image. Next part in the process is fixing the boot loader. The conversion will most likely fail at the very end with an error Unable to reconfigure the destination virtual machine. And sometimes that would not even work, and I had to reference the source machine by IP address. I had to disable IPv6 and add my DNS suffixes to the DNS tab. Note, during the conversion I had change a few options in the Helper VM network section for it to connect to my source machine. Using the VMware vCenter Converter import or convert the VM or physical server to the ESXi host. dev/sda1 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro) dev/sda2 on /boot type ext2 (rw,relatime,stripe=4) The output should be something like this: /dev/mapper/counterstrike-vg-root on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro) We need to know what is mounted where, run this on your source machine. You'll be using them to figure out what to replace values with at the end. You will need to get your current ones for this whole process to work. The disk UUID's change during the conversion. The result is this: PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)" The contents of my file is this: PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)"Ĭhange the ID line to ubuntu and VERSION_ID to 20.04 and save the file.
Now edit the file, it is only modifiable by root so you'll need to sudo it. This is the only change we make to the original host. We will be messing with that file so make a copy, we will store it in root's home directory. The file the converter looks at to determine the OS is /etc/os-releases. Fake the converter to think it's Ubuntu and not Debian On to the meat of this post and actually doing the work. I don't think it does anything, but I can't be certain. We only make one change to your original host. Other images may work, but this guide may need some adjusting to make that work.īefore we do anything, backup your current system. You will need a Debian Live CD image, I would recommend using the one that does not have a GUI. Fix the network interfaces since the interface names changed.It did copy the VM over, so that was good. This got it to clone but it failed to reconfigure the grub bootloader. Fake the converter into thinking it is Ubuntu.The solution I came up with to migrate my systems was this: Those files are stored at C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone\logs. You can see it all in the log files for the worker. There are also some log entries stating Unrecognized guest OS id 'debian10-64'. The converter tool doesn't recognize Debian as a distribution so when it queries the ESXi host to see if EFI is supported, it requests it as a linuxOs and otherDistro. I don't accept that.Ī quick outline of the issue. The only thing I could find was "you can't" and "it's not supported". I tried using the VMware vCenter Converter but kept getting the The destination does not support EFI firmware. I'm building all new VM's for most things, but there was 2 that I didn't want to rebuild. I'm shrinking my home network and moving everything onto ESXi and dumping a lot of stuff. It was challenging because Debian is not supported. I moved a Debian 10 VM from Hyper-V to ESXi using the VMWare Converter using the P2V or Remote Linux machine option.