ESXi + NFS datastore = Fail?

[Silent.Sin]

I've recently created a whitebox ESXi 4.0 (B 236512) server on the cheap as a sort of sandbox testing environment at work. Everything is up and running fine locally on the box: I've got 2 VMs installed, vSphere client, PowerCLI, ssh enabled, etc all without a hitch. Now that I've got that down I want to move on and attempt to add a remote datastore to test out network VM hosting so we can try to better consolidate our data. I've hit a roadblock and maybe it's just because I'm using the free versions of everything that is limiting me. I would really appreciate some feedback.

I've got an NFS shared directory on one of our physical servers using Windows 2003 and SFU (our current off-site backup solution client can only run on Windows so that's where I'm starting off..aside: any suggestions on a better NFS server for Win?). When I mount the NFS share as a new datastore using vSphere all looks to be fine and dandy. I can see all the files in vSphere as well as verify they show up in the proper spot with ssh. However when I add a .vmx file to the Inventory in vSphere that is on the new NFS datastore I get an error I can't quite wrap my head around.

The VM registration appears to succeed but in the Inventory the new NFS VM is listed as "Unknown (invalid)" as if registration failed. The VM works perfectly outside of this environment as it is just a backup copy of a VM I use daily. I've also attempted to use a fresh vmx file downloaded from the virtual appliance marketplace with the same results. Am I missing a step somewhere? Will ESXi only allow for local VM storage and I will need to actually copy the files over (seems unlikely)? Is this a configuration issue where I need a dedicated vSwitch for the NFS link (thought that was just for iSCSI)? Thanks for any help!

ESXi server specs in case it matters:
Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H mATX motherboard (on-board NIC disabled, unsupported)
AMD Athlon II X3 425 @ 2.7 GHz
8GB RAM
250GB local SATA storage (single drive, non-RAID atm)
Intel Pro/1000 MT Desktop PCI NIC (have a 2nd one ready to install for future NAS connectivity..more on that later)

 

[archivalbackup]

was your VM you are trying to use made in workstation/player? If so it needs to be converted before it will work in ESX.

ESXi Free supports all shared storage options. You just need a Kernel port that can reach it.

 

[Silent.Sin]

was your VM you are trying to use made in workstation/player? If so it needs to be converted before it will work in ESX.

ESXi Free supports all shared storage options. You just need a Kernel port that can reach it.

Wow I feel like a dolt for not thinking of that first. This machine was actually made back in a time where player couldn't create vmx files so the base vmx was made at www.easyvmx.com and I installed the OS onto that so I can understand why it wouldn't have worked right off the bat.

Anyway, after the (painfully slow) conversion over the weekend it's working perfectly! Actually a little better than expected given that this is currently sitting on a 100Mbps network. When we get GigE installed I can imagine NFS hosting should work very well for our purposes.

For a conversion involving a VM on a network share on another machine to the machine doing the conversion that will be the NFS host, what would help speed the conversion process up? Does that have more to do with disk and network performance for this type of scenario or is it the CPU of the machine doing the conversion? Should the VM be copied over to the conversion machine first before any work is done instead of doing it over the network? VM Converter was only reporting an average of about 700KB/s for the process which obviously isn't maxing out our LAN or the disk interfaces so I'm thinking it has more to do with CPU specs. A 30GB VM took quite awhile at that pace as you can imagine. Again thanks for the help.