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John Kay
User
Karma: 2

Covert Physical Machine to Virtual Machine - 2008/09/06 09:14 Nicky/Nick

Any chance of doing a show on converting Physical machines to Virtual Machines, it is something the company I am working for wants me to look into.

At the moment the network is running really crap. I think each server has to many roles (set up before my time here)

Would you recommend setting up several virtual servers and sharing the roles out???????

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/get.html

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Joe Bieniecki User Karma: 0	Re:Covert Physical Machine to Virtual Machine - 2008/09/06 10:59 I like the idea of a show on how to do a P2V changeover. The title of the original post poses a more intriguing scenario however.
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Mark Bradley
User
Karma: 2

Re:Covert Physical Machine to Virtual Machine - 2008/09/08 07:37 I use converter pretty regularly, it is a good tool, but there are other competitor products available. It is definately worth spending some time working out how many servers you need to P2V. As some products are licensed by number of migrations (PlateSpin - http://www.platespin.com/) and others are all you can eat/convert. Converter in it's highest form is only available when you have VMware Enterprise licensing... So if you already have VMware ESX you should have at least access to the Standard version of Converter.

With the growing numbers of players in the Virtulisation space now, if you have more than one version of hyper-visor or Virtual Host servers a third party product that can P2V guests to any Virtual Host may be better.

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Niall
User
Karma: 2

Re:Covert Physical Machine to Virtual Machine - 2008/10/22 00:52 Hey all,

I'm also a regular user of VMware Converter. It's a great product and does extactly what it says on the tin. If and when it does fail it is usually down to DNS/IP misconfigurations.
Unfortuantely there is no way to automate the cleanup process of the servers afterwards (unless someone here has an amazing powershell script that will do that for).

Alternative products and options are available for the p2v process. One which I think is handy is an imaging tool (like Acronis or Ghost). This way you avoid putting the VMware Converter agent onto the physical server prior to convertion (without a vmware converter agent you have exact like for like hardware to virtual). You can also change partition sizes with a imaging tool(well you can with Acronis).

You can also use good old ntbackup. Just backup your source and restore to a target vm you created earlier and you have easy p2v.

With all the above you need to do post P2V cleanup. I have a really good doco here at work for the post cleanup and I will post and get others to comment so that I am not missing any essential steps.

Cheers,
Superfly.nn

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Niall User Karma: 2	Re:Covert Physical Machine to Virtual Machine - 2008/10/22 00:59 How could I forget, Hp sim/cim (whatever you call it) has an additional module called VMM and this can do V2V, P2V and P2P. I've heard that it can throw Virtual Centre into fits but If you don't have virtual centre to manage your vm's and are a HP shop then get a demo version and test it out.
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