It seems to me many people are facing the same ugly error when they try to convert a physical server to a virtual server using VMware Consolidation Planning tool. The error usually get after the tool has finished annalyzing the physical machine & it was deemed ‘Ready for consolidation’ with Confidence ‘high’.

When the user select ‘Plan Consolidation’, select the server, and click on ‘Consolidate’, they get the famous error message, “A general system error occurred: Ufad server is not running.”

The image below show the error:

As a lot of people seems to stumble by this every day, I have decided to discuss the way I usually resolve this problem.

First step: I usually check if all the VMware Services specially the VMware Convertor & Consolidation tools has been started normally. If any is down I will start it & then check again.

Second Step: If all the VMware Services are started & seems operating normally I would restart the VMware Convertor & Consolidation tools & then check again if the consolidation process work.

Please note usually step one & two are efficient to fix the problem, though in many times I had noticed although the services are started when you restart them they don’t start again. This is usually caused by that the password of the account these services are running under has been changed without changing them on the service. So for you to fix this you will have to go to each of the services & update the username & password accordingly. As a best practice these services should run using a service account with a never changing password. After you fix the password restart the service & you should be back and running.

I hope this will help some one get out of this trap. If it helped you out or need any more details about it please leave us a comment.