Import of esxi vm fails

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matthewejacpb

New Member
Dec 7, 2025
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I fairly seasoned with proxmox but i cannot figure out what is going wrong here. we have successfully migrated 6 other VMs from this same host but the very last one will not import for some reason. what is compounding the issue is that it's an active server that we have to shut down completely to do the migration. and it's 1.2TB in size so it's naturally going to take a while to import anyway. It keeps erroring out with input/output errors. but im fairly certain its not the host. the VM will boot and operate as normal on the host. any help in pointing us in the right direction would be appriciated. I did get it to go to around 16% once then it failed with the same error. I'm thinking it just doesn't like the layout of the VM or something cause all 6 of the others have worked fine. I was going to export directly from the host but the speeds were so bad (25Mbs) that it would not have completed in time before we had to start it back up.

Rounding up size to full physical extent 4.00 MiB
Logical volume "vm-106-disk-0" created.
Logical volume pve/vm-106-disk-0 changed.
transferred 0.0 B of 528.0 KiB (0.00%)
transferred 528.0 KiB of 528.0 KiB (100.00%)
transferred 528.0 KiB of 528.0 KiB (100.00%)
efidisk0: successfully created disk 'local-lvm:vm-106-disk-0,efitype=4m,size=4M'
create full clone of drive (win11ITsoftware:ha-datacenter/DS-2/ASC-ABILAMIP.autismwv.org/ASC-ABILAMIP.autismwv.org-000001.vmdk)
Rounding up size to full physical extent 1.19 TiB
Logical volume "vm-106-disk-2" created.
Logical volume pve/vm-106-disk-2 changed.
transferred 0.0 B of 1.2 TiB (0.00%)
qemu-img: error while reading at byte 0: Input/output error
Logical volume "vm-106-disk-0" successfully removed.
Logical volume "vm-106-disk-2" successfully removed.
TASK ERROR: unable to create VM 106 - cannot import from 'win11ITsoftware:ha-datacenter/DS-2/ASC-ABILAMIP.autismwv.org/ASC-ABILAMIP.autismwv.org-000001.vmdk' - copy failed: command '/usr/bin/qemu-img convert -p -n -f vmdk -O raw /run/pve/import/esxi/win11ITsoftware/mnt/ha-datacenter/DS-2/ASC-ABILAMIP.autismwv.org/ASC-ABILAMIP.autismwv.org-000001.vmdk zeroinit:/dev/pve/vm-106-disk-2' failed: exit code 1
 
Update: I finally found the issue (i think) this is what i did, for those that may stumble across this thread.

I went in and rechecked the esxi host and saw that a snapshot had been created, i think by our backup manager, proxmox does not like it when snapshots are in there. I think what happened was during the import that made it to around 16% the backup started on it and created a snapshot, nuking the import. and i did not realize that and kept trying to import the VM and resulted in failure. the other thing that i found was that there was a file with the extension .vmsd which is a leftover sometimes left during the snapshot process, I think, i could be wrong, that on all the other failed attempts even though there were no snapshots, proxmox was seeing this file and it resulted in a failed import. in the future it would be something that the devs could place in to ignore if that file is in there if that's what is causing the failure when it seems it should work.

What i did was, go into the esxi host filemanager, open the vm folder and delete that file. from what i understand it's a bug with vmware not necessarily proxmox. anyway, once i deleted that and deleted the snapshots, and turned off the backup job for that vm the vm imported. and it works fine. had to tweak the network adapters but other than that it came up and is working as intended.
 
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