I can't find any recent documentation about importing exported KVM VMs into vCenter. I have tried once doing this:
Convert KVM vm to VMDK: qemu-img convert -p -O vmdk /dev/vms/sandbox /srv/storage/sandbox.vmdk
Copy the file to an ESXi host with SCP.
Create a new VM using the copied VMDK file as the system disk.
The VM runs for a while but eventually throws massive ATA errors and locks up.
When the VM is restarted vCenter has made the VMDK read only and it is unusable.
Attempts to clone the VM hang.
Attempts to clone the VDK file with vmkfstools fail with:
vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/vsanDatastore/ISOs/sandbox.vmdk -d thin /vmfs/volumes/vsanDatastore/ISOs/sandbox/vmdk
Destination disk format: VMFS thin-provisioned
Cloning disk '/vmfs/volumes/vsanDatastore/ISOs/sandbox.vmdk'...
Failed to clone disk: The system cannot find the file specified (25).
The only comprehensible and not too ancient description of the process I could find online was this: https://nowhere.dk/articles/moving-virtual-machines-from-kvm-to-esxi-6-0
Which covers converting what seem to be a KVM SCSI disk to something Vcenter can use. But no info about ATA.
The VM I am trying to move is running centOS 6.2 and the destination vCenter version is 6.5
It also contains the dubious advice, "Now open the newly created vmdk file in vi and change the line ddb.adapterType from ide to lsilogic" which is impossible since a VMDK is neither human readable nor small enough to open successfully in a text editor.
Has anyone successfully moved a ATA-based KVM VM to vCenter?