OSAM migration fails to successfully migrate a Virtual machine alternative Method of Migration.

Products

• VMware HCX

Issue/Introduction

OSAM migrations involve migrating a virtual machine from a physical or other virtual environment to a  VMware environment.  The Sentinel agent is installed in the source virtual machine and then that connects to the HCX Sentinel Gateway.  The migration then begins.  There are occasions where OSAM is not able to perform the migration.  This could be due to several reasons, for example, the operating system is not supported with OSAM migrations.  The list of supported operating system is contained in the HCX user guide. 

This article presents an alternative method to migrate a non VMware source into the VMware vSphere environment.  The vCenter Converter Standalone can be use to perform physical to virtual (P2V) or virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations.  This is a free download that is found in the Broadcom customer portal.

Environment

HCX

Cause

Repeated attempts to migrate a non VMware virtual machine using HCX OSAM continuously fails.
A physical machine needs to be migrated and converted into a VMware virtual machine. 

The failure of an OSAM migration can be attributed to many things.  The OSAM failure should be investigated first before the decision to utilize the vCenter Converter Standalone method is employed.
The reason for the OSAM migration failures are outside of this article.  This article is focused on an alternative method to accomplish migrating a non-VMware host into a VMware environment as a VMware Virtual Machine.

Resolution

vCenter Converter Standalone is a tool that is installed and used to migrate non VMware virtual machines or physical host into VMware virtual machines and place them in the vSphere environment.

There are two scenarios which are dependent on whether or not the source OS is windows or Linux/Unix.  The Standalone converter is downloaded from customer portal (https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/productdownloads?subfamily=VMware%20vCenter%20converter).  This link will take you to the download section of the portal.

In the search bar enter "VMware vCenter Converter". This is case sensitive.

Click on the result tile to open the next window.

Click on the version needed. The next window will have the download.

This tool can be install on windows hosts.  It is not installable on Linux/Unix hosts.

Scenario 1
Install the Standalone Converter on the window source machine. 
Once installed follow open the tool and follow the wizard to perform the P2V or P2P conversion.

Scenario 2
Install the Standalone Converter on a window  virtual machine resident in the vCenter site that will be the destination.
This configuration must be done if the source host is not windows.  Linux/Unix operating system will need this configuration.
Once installed the wizard will ask for the source information and then the destination information for the conversion.

Documentation for vCenter Converter Standalone can be found here for more details.

Additional Information

The user guide for vCenter Converter 6.6.0 is also attached for review.  It is the most current as of 26 February 25.
The download for vCenter Converter Standalone 6.6.0 is also attached to this article.