I recently ran into an issue using VMware Converter to move a VM from VMware Server to VMware ESX v3.0.2 that seems like it could be pretty common, so I thought I would share incase someone else ran into this problem.

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.

'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.

For more information, check out my blog post about this VMware problem