I am running ESXi 5.0 (free version). I am having issues exporting an OVA template. I've done it before on this machine dozens of times without issue. I do monthly exports to back up an application we have running. This time around it is getting to somewhere between 11-20% complete, and then it errors out. The message I get is that it failed to export virtual machine, operation timed out. It doesn't give me any more specifics. I have tried to back this up multiple times now and get the same error message.
Are there any useful logs I can look at to try to figure out what is going on? I have tried exporting with two different client machines, same result. I have also tried rebooting ESXi completely, still errors out. The image I am trying to back up is quite large (somewhere around 1TB). Could that be some of the problem? It is this large because I created the image as thick provisioned. I wish now I had set it up as thin provisioned. When I do a succesfull backup, it takes at least 14 hours to complete. Is there any easy way to convert this to thin provisioned in the free version? Like I said, I have backed up this image multiple times in the past without issue.
Any ideas on why this is failing? Help is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Carl