Comment 1 for bug 1284284

Its not just the adapter_type affecting the boot of the volume. It appears the sparse tag is also causing an issue. I know because I tweaked my cinder devstack to acknowledge IDE. So handling sparse would also have to be part of this fix.

From my testing, you should be able to create a volume in Openstack and manually start the VM for the volume in vCenter without error. This is not true of this sparse-ide image. https://www.dropbox.com/s/793n37blb4ra3t6/disk-vmdk.vmdk