Yes, that's the error I was presented with this morning after attempting to clone a new VM from a template. The number of virtual devices exceeds the maximum for a given controller!!
It's such a great error message, so explanatory. immediately I went to look at the number of drives in the VM, thinking maybe it has too many virtual disks or is attached to some other virtual disk or something, however, it only had 2….so, once again I turn to my pre-vmware support techniques (Google).
So, results pointed me to this KB article. Easy enough fix right, don't edit the hardware while cloning. which after some digging was exactly what had been done. Well…problem solved right? Not really…
I looked at a few of the other google results, which all pointed to converting the template back to a vm, and selecting the correct network. I thought I would do this, as some of our templates still had the old default 'VM Network' attached to them, and since then we have added some different VLAN networks, which were our new default vm networks. So, hey, lets just do it anyways, templates were probably in dire need of some updating anyway.
So, convert to VM, right click -> Edit Settings…. Lets have a look….
or not!!!!
PropertyCollector.RetrieveContents for object "propertyCollector" on vCenter Server blah blah blah….of course….that's what's wrong with it…
So….what to do now…a few more google searches and the old remove/add trick and I'm back in business…
Basically, right click the VM -> Remove from Inventory. Then, browse the datastore that the VM lives on, right click on the .vmx file and 'Add to Inventory' and I was back in business….
I could once again edit the settings of that VM. By the time I got around to this however, I was tired…and couldn't remember what I was looking for in the first place…right, the networks…Nope! They were fine…However after completing all these steps I was able to do a successful clone.
And 5 years later when trying to convert a laptop install of Windows 7 to a virtual machine I get the same error. Turns out that the laptop had VMWorkstation installed which creates multiple network adaptors which the converter doesn’t like. Disabling all the virtual adaptors as well as Bluetooth and WiFi the conversion then works.
Thanks for your article it pointed me in the direction of “network stuff” while the initial error had made me look at licensing and capacity configuration.