Installation guide

C H A P T E R 2 Creating and Configuring Virtual Machines
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Disk Geometry Failures When Importing GSX Server Virtual Machines
If you used vmkfstools to import a virtual machine created under GSX Server to
ESX Server, after you import the virtual machine, you may see the following message:
“Disk geometry mismatch. To power on the virtual machine you should specify
scsi<adapter-id>:<target-id>.biosGeometry="<cylinders>/
<heads>/<sectors>" in the configuration file.”
A similar problem may occur if you used the management interface file manager to
import the virtual machine, though no message appears. If you have problems
powering on a virtual machine with the imported disk, then you may have a
mismatch with the virtual disk’s geometry.
Virtual disks created under GSX Server use a different disk geometry than virtual disks
created under ESX Server. To determine the correct disk geometry, run the following
vmkfstools command on the source virtual disk (the copy of the virtual disk on
the GSX Server host, not the disk in a VMFS partition):
vmkfstools -g //path/to/<sourceVirtualDisk>.vmdk
Once you determine the disk geometry, you can add the correct geometry
information to the configuration file. To modify the configuration file, follow the steps
under Modifying the Configuration File Directly (Advanced Users Only) on page 141.
Create an option called scsi<adapter-id>:<target-id>.biosGeometry
and set the value of the option to "<cylinders>/<heads>/<sectors>",
where <adapter-id>:<target-id> is the SCSI ID of the virtual disk on the ESX
Server system and "<cylinders>/<heads>/<sectors>" is the number of
cylinders, heads and sectors on the virtual disk returned by the vmkfstools
command.
For example, if the virtual disk is located on the SCSI 0:0 node in the virtual machine
on the ESX Server system, and you determine that the disk geometry of the original
virtual disk (the one on the GSX Server host) contains 261 cylinders, 255 heads and 63
sectors, you would add the following option to the configuration file:
scsi0:0.biosGeometry
And you would assign the following value to the new option:
261/255/63
Otherwise, if you do not add the new geometry information to the configuration file,
when you power on the virtual machine, a message appears stating Error
loading operating system. To power on the virtual machine, you must add
the new option to the configuration file, as discussed above.