Symptom

A Full System Recovery (FSR) direct to VMware fails with the error "Object reference not set to an instance of an object".

 

Cause

This happens if FSR encounters an empty Datacenter in VMware when connecting, for example if you attempt a restore while in the process of expanding your VMware environment, when there will be Datacenters present that do not yet have anything assigned to them. An empty Datacenter will have no Resource Pools, which means it cannot allow the creation of the virtual machine necessary for the restore to succeed.
 

Solution

To resolve this, you can either:

1. remove the empty Datacenter and attempt the restore again, or

2. finish your environment upgrade so that there are no empty Datacenters, and attempt the restore again.