The VM Sage

If you’re trying to run VMware Converter to p2v a machine and it keeps failing with a VSSSnapshotFault, this is one potential fix you should check into.

This post is going to focus the new VMware Converter 4, but you’ll also get this error with the older Converter 3.0 series.

If you’re trying to convert a physical machine to your ESX farm, and it keeps failing early in the process, have a look at the logs. In Converter 4, it will offer to make you a nice zip file but you can also view the logs in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone\logs\ (whew!)

Have a look at the most recent vmware-converter-agent-#.log — replace the # with an actual number of course. If you see something like this:

[liveImportSource,3808] LiveImportSource::CreateSnapshot: Unable to create an atomic system-wide snapshot, creating per-volume snapshots.

[liveImportSource,3516] VSS Snapshot creation failed for the volume \\?\Volume{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}\ with error code 2147754758

[liveImportSource,3827] Failed to create volume snapshot

[liveImportSource,3836] LiveImportSource::CreateSnapshot: Unable to create a snapshot. converter.fault.VSSSnapshotFault

TaskImpl has failed with MethodFault::Exception: converter.fault.VSSSnapshotFault

[volumeBasedCloneTask,912] Skipping post-cloning since the volume-based clone task did not complete successfully.

Check if the source machine has the NetApp SnapDrive product installed, or something similar which uses a VSS driver. In the case of this particular box, I searched the vmware-converter-server-0.log for “VSS” and found a couple hits, with this being the most suspicious:


[#2] (converter.info.ServiceInfo) {
[#2] dynamicType = ,
[#2] serviceName = "Navssprv",
[#2] displayName = "Data ONTAP VSS Hardware Provider",
[#2] description = "VSS Hardware Provider for Data ONTAP LUNs",
[#2] currentState = "stopped",
[#2] startType = "autoStart",
[#2] canBeStopped = false,
[#2] },


After I uninstalled the NetApp SnapDrive tool using the Add/Remove Programs, the conversion completed without issue. It appears that something in the SnapDrive VSS installation was interfering with Converter’s use of the VSS driver, thus causing the error.