Alternative P2V option for VMWare

DeaconFrost

DeaconFrost

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Sep 6, 2007
Messages
11,582
I have an old Windows 7 Ultimate tower that I am trying ti turn into an ESXi VM. The previous two identical towers worked with their Convert application. Loaded it up, sent it to our vSphere appliance, and within 40 minutes or so, I was booting them on our vBlock.

This third one refuses to install the Convert app. More accurately, it refuses to start the services. The tower boots fine on it's own and is logging into the same domain with the same service account as the previous two towers.

Are there any alternatives? I pulled the hard drive and have it home with me for the weekend, thinking I was going to try and pull it into VMWare Workstation to get the process moving along.

I'm looking for any better suggestions or alternative applications to send this drive/tower up to our VM environment.
 
Worst case you should be able to make a backup image of the drive with something like acronis and restore it to a fresh VM, or heck even a copy of one of the working ones and restore it to that.
 
Starwind only runs on 64-bit OSes now. Of course, I'm trying to P2V an old Windows 7 32-bit tower. I was able to connect the drive to another tower that was running Windows 10 x64, and use the VMWare Converter to "image" only the external drive. Hopefully, it will boot.
 
I always just use gparted and make an image of the computer and then clone it onto the vm. I have never had great results with those 'pc to vm' utilities.
 
Windows built-in image backup is decent for doing this too you will just need to boot up the install disk and point it to your backup location when doing the restore inside the vm.
 
Macrium reflect backup can mount its backups as hyper-v or virtualbox, fwiw. It greatly simplifies p2v. I'm guessing you can clone that VM to a file structure that can be mounted into vmware if that's what you want.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top