I’m having a heck of a time with VMware Converter on my Windows 2003 x64 VMware Server machine. Before I built this particular x64 box, I used to run Converter all the time on a 32bit server with no issues. But for some reason, it gets wonky on the new one.
Heck, I even upgraded to version 2 of VMware server – and I was not a fan of this version when I first saw it in beta. Fortunately, I don’t hate it nearly as much now. In fact, I rather like not having to use the old management console. Odd how 6 months can change your impressions.
Anyways, back to Converter. When I run it, the server slowly “leaks” away all the memory. Memory doesn’t go to processes, it just disappears. Here’s a shot from a 6GB server that had over 3 GB free before starting:
After a period of time, the VMware processes from the running servers lose all their memory too which, as you might guess, kills ‘em off quite nicely.
Those vmware-vmx.exe processes should be around 1GB, 768 MB and 512 MB. Yikes, what happened?
Nothing in the event logs. Maybe Converter doesn’t like x64? The FAQ page says that’s not the case… but when I re-ran the conversion from a 32 bit Win2k3 server I didn’t have any issues. A very brief search didn’t turn up much though.
Anyone else ran into this?
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October 14th, 2008 
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I’ve used VMWare Converter on 64bits machine quite a few times, and I’ve never seen that problem. Not very helpful, I fear. But at least you know the problem might not come from VMWare converter itself. Which version are you using, by the way?
Glad to hear that it should work
Thanks for that, at least.
I think I’ll try another conversion soon — I just noticed that the same conversion, from a 32 bit machine, took over 5 hours. Perhaps the issue was more with the machine I’m converting as that’s a long time for that machine (a less than half full 80 GB drive with XP)
I’m running the latest version as downloaded yesterday morning. I forget version — 3.0.3 I think?
Finally had the chance to try another VMware conversion run today.
Same issue, all the memory on the x64 server slowly “bled” away.
Odd.
Hi there, maybe not much add to your problem, but when I have installed vmware converter on my workstation (qcore, 8GB, x64 vista entp.) login to my domain or local account started to be unpossible. After the login process, screen just still blank, nothing happened. No sign in logs (safe mode), solution for me was disabling each of converter system service.
Before this I tried to import acronis tib image to vmware wrks 6.5.0 but the vmware app. just frozen in some program loop. Unfortunately because of the work termin I hadn’t enought time to analyze this more deeply. But it isn’t very good either.
I just had the same problem. Tried to run converter under Server 2008 x64. The conversion ran quickly and then the box went to a crawl. Eventually I figured out that it was out of memory, although the process usage didn’t show anything. I stopped the conversion and 13GB of memory came back to the OS. I guess I’ll run the conversion on a different server.
Actually I don’t think that this is a VMWare issue. I think that the issue has to do with the file copy.
See here: http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/05/08/slow-large-file-copy-issues.aspx
I discovered Windows-2008-x64-out-of-memory problems just trying to copy the VMDK file I created on my 32-bit server onto the 64-bit server.
I also posted here on this:
http://serverfault.com/questions/56791/windows-server-2008-x64-large-file-transfers-and-memory-usage
Brian — good stuff, thanks for following up!
[...] conversion). Unfortunately, thanks to the “large file copy issues” of Windows 2003 (see this post and last comments for more info) the server very quickly ran out of memory only about 20% into the [...]