I recently ran into an issue using VMware Converter to move a VM from VMware Server to VMware ESX v3.0.2. I had already successfully converted two other VMs in this manner, every time I started the conversion it would bomb out during the creation of the VM on ESX. The log files in my profile at …\<username>\Local Settings\Temp\1\vmware-temp indicted the following error. [more]

'P2V' 5748 error] [task,295] Task failed: P2VError UFAD_SYSTEM_ERROR(Invalid response code: 400 Bad Request)

I did some research and found that this can often be caused by invalid ASCII characters in the VM name or path. I looked and I didn’t have anything unusual in there; all standard alpha characters. Then I got to looking around and found that the “Notes” section of the VM Summary did have some double dashes ( -- ) and periods ( . ) in it. I didn’t think that should cause an issue, but I decided to just take out all the text in the Notes section anyway. When I fired off the conversion again it worked! There must have been something in that text that was causing an issue. Here is the notes section is was choking on.

Package Testing Server – Windows Server 2003 SP2 – TS – Windows 2003 server template. Setup to match production TS Cluster.