physical server to VM best way?

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sdadept

Limp Gawd
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Jul 3, 2004
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I have a couple physical servers that are getting long in the tooth (gaming servers). I don't want to get rid of them because they still get some use, but not enough use to justify paying for their co-lo anymore. Whats the best way to convert a physical server to a virtual machine (either vmware workstation or vmware esxi). ?
 
Subscribing since I'm planning on virtualizing a few physical home PCs into VMs as well.
 
so far the only thing i've found is a product from acronis but it costs like $850 for the version that does w2k3.
 
dude, you are seriously my hero. seriously.... haha. no idea why i didnt find that when i was web searching.
 
You have to know its there. Not quite sure how I know about it to be honest. I think it was in a presentation at work.
 
The converter works great even if your not using vmware as your vmhost. I have used it to do a p2v migration to use on virtualbox.

What are you going to use as a vm host? A bare metal solution or virtualbox/and or vmware workstation?
 
There is also XenServer, the install CD has a convert machine to VM option when booting from it,.
 
so I've spent about 8 hours so far on this conversion and I'm finally getting it stable. The biggest problem I ran into wasn't the conversion, it was the hardware after. The converter doesn't remove the installed hardware devices, so when my virtual machine tried to come up, it thought it still had all the hardware from the previous box. It took me at least 5 hours to go through all of them and get the machine to quit blue screening. I know the acronis thing has something that wipes the HAL layer, doesn't vmware have something similar? if so i just didnt find it. :/
 
yep. That happens. If you use converter enterprise with sysprep, it'll deal with that, buti t's tricky with the free one.
 
Can you sysprep the system and then use the converter to transfer things across.
 
I'm embarrassed to say I don't know what sysprep is. So what is it? heh
 
Without knowing the particulars there many ways to handle this. I assume your trying to migrate a physical to a virtual. What sort of environment are going to be migrating too? Is is a XEN, VMware, Microsoft or Virtualbox setup?

Secondly what OS are these servers running now?
 
problem with sysprep is that it shuts the machine down.. so i dont think you can run converter program after sysprep....

what we have done is... sysprep machine.... power it back on and use barts pe... on both... vmware and the physical box.... and ghost across the network... reboot the vmware when done and viola....

I used to use vmware server (free) and vmware 6.5 workstation (non free) but lately...

im liking sun virtualbox more and more each day... it is sweet....
 
telefragger, great info. I think we'll give that a shot. We are trying to migrate a lot of older servers to virtual machines.
 
TeleFragger said:
problem with sysprep is that it shuts the machine down.. so i dont think you can run converter program after sysprep....

what we have done is... sysprep machine.... power it back on and use barts pe... on both... vmware and the physical box.... and ghost across the network... reboot the vmware when done and viola....

I used to use vmware server (free) and vmware 6.5 workstation (non free) but lately...

im liking sun virtualbox more and more each day... it is sweet....
Click to expand...

cold clone CD
 
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