Convert ESXi v6 VMDK to ESXi v5 VMDK
I recently tried to copy a VMDK from ESXi version 6.0 to another server which was version 5.0 It failed the first time due to the virtual hardware being version 11, which isn’t supported on ESXi 5.0.
The next thing I tried, was to copy a VMDK across, that got added to the new virtual machine with no problems but when I attempted to boot the VM I received the following error:
An unexpected error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM vm-622. Module DevicePowerOn power on failed. Unable to create virtual SCSI device for scsi0:1, '/vmfs/volumes/54813a47-8d0eedcc-43c8-001e0bd161d0/yubikey/Yubi-0.vmdk' Failed to open disk scsi0:1: Unsupported or invalid disk type 7. Ensure that the disk has been imported.
I knew that it would be a problem and the solution was a simple one. Having recently migrated 40 KVM based VM’s to ESX, I was quite familiar with vmkfstools. To make the VMDK bootable perform the following:
vmkfstools -d zeroedthick -i server.INPUT.vmdk server.OUTPUT.vmdk
Then attach server.OUTPUT.vmdk as the new virtual harddrive.