[VMWare] Device uses a controller that is not supported

Today I tried to deploy a Virtual Appliance from Bitnami on my ESXi server using ovftool:

ovftool.exe bitnami-xxx.vmx vi://192.168.0.100

But each time I had an error:

Device ‘VirtualDisk’ uses a controller that is not supported. This is a general limitation of the virtual machine’s virtual hardware version on the selected host.

What was funny, it was perfectly fine if I converted the virtual machine to OVA format and started it using… VirtualBox.

I googled a bit and found out that some people had that similar problems and what they did was to upgrade virtual hardware from version 4 to 7. It wasn’t a solution for me because I already had version 7 – so maybe the problem was that I had “too new” virtual hardware? I opened bitnami-xxx.vmx file with a text editor and there I had:

virtualHW.version = "4"

I changed it to “7” and voila – it worked!

2 thoughts on “[VMWare] Device uses a controller that is not supported”

  1. Thank you!

    It worked. However, if the VM is already listed in the inventory, in order for it to work, remove the VM from inventory, and add it back in (browse to data store, and add the .vmx to inventory, etc.) and it powers on.

  2. In my case it turned out to be that the “Guest OS Version” was old, I edited the VM to reflect what the actual OS installed was and it was then OK.
    I had been receiving the following when cloning: Device ‘Hard disk 1’ uses a controller that is not supported. This is not a limitation of the host in general, but of the virtual machine’s configured guest OS on the selected host.

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