Target VM does not boot after migration from VMware ESX to Citrix Xen if boot files are located in second disk

  • 7012906
  • 19-Jul-2013
  • 01-Aug-2017

Environment

NetIQ PlateSpin Migrate 12.x
NetIQ PlateSpin Migrate 11.x
NetIQ PlateSpin Migrate 9.3

Situation

When a VM is converted from VMware ESX to Citrix Xen and its boot files are allocated in second disk, the VM does not boot and manual intervention is requested. This is because the Citrix XEN VM tries to boot with disk 0 rather than with the bootfiles allocated to disk 2.

Source is a VM hosted on VMware ESX server
Target host is a Citrix Xen server


Resolution

To resolve this problem, rearrange the virtual-disk position in XenCenter so that the virtual machine boots from the virtual disk containing the operating system. 
The below knowledge article at the Citrix Web site includes information about how to change the position of the virtual disk containing the operating system.

Cause

If a VMware VM boots from a SCSI disk but also contains one or more IDE hard disks, the VM might not boot when you convert it to XenServer. The reason is that the migration process assigns the IDE hard disks lower device numbers than SCSI disks. However, Citrix Xen VMs boot from the hard disk assigned to device 0.
 
Below is a link to the document from Citrix which discusses this behavior (Page 21).