Conversion: Device ‘USB’ is not supported

Recently I ran into an interesting scenario in which I used the VMware Converter 4.0 to P2V (Physical to Virtual) machines on a stand-alone training network to VMware Workstation/Player images on a removable harddrive.   I then took those images and used Converter to put them on ESX 4.0.  Everything went smoothly.  When I attempted to power on the converted machines on ESX I got this: “Device ‘USB’ is not supported”  Obviously, I know this….  no USB on ESX.  But, since the physical machiens were originally converted to a Workstation image (which does support USB) they were maintained.  When I edited the Virtual Machine settings and attempted to remove the “USB” devices, it would not actually remove them (although it pretended that it did.

If you find yourself in this situation, you will need to edit the VMX file or use the ‘Advanced’ settings editor in vSphere Client to remove the references to the USB devices manually.  Once that is done, they should fire up with no problem!