It seems that the issue where Starwind is unable to open exported vmdk files continues... Why was a solution or suggested work around never posted? I have stopped a pair of VMware* VMs, exported them via the standard VMware Infrastructure client export process and
every time I get the "Error opening file" message. I have tried this both by exporting to a PC and a server, no disk compression or anything else silly applies.
I honestly feel as though this tool is simply unable to open vmdk files exported by VMware, perhaps by design on the part of VMware which is likely losing market share to Microsoft...
* our VMware servers are running "ESX Server 3i 3.5.0 build-153875"
PS. VMDK2VHS also can not open these files which makes me even more suspicious on the VMware side of this fiasco.
I'm going to try these tools against the non-exported vmdk files which can be had by browsing the datastore on the VMware servers directly...