I was trying to use the VMWare Standalone Converter tool today to P2V a very old physical server, running CentOS 5.2. The age of the OS meant that I had to use Converter v.5 as newer converters would not connect to the source server OS. I also had to build a brand new ESXi 5.5 host, as newer ESXi versions require modern security protocols & ciphers which aren’t supported by Converter 5.5.

After setting everything up, I ran the Converter wizard. The task failed with the following message:
FAILED: Unable to obtain the IP address of the helper virtual machine

It turns out that the VM receiving the data couldn’t obtain an DHCP address from the network. This, in turn, meant there was no IP for the Converter to send the data to.

When running through the Conversion wizard, you can set Helper VM Network Options via. the Options screen. Simply assign a compatible static IP and the Helper VM will boot with those settings.

After manually setting the IP, the migration task proceeded normally.