Virtualizing physical Windows XP Professional on a domain

[bardous]

Due to some legacy applications running on a machine at work, I've decided that it might be worth trying to virtualize the current machine that everything is running on. I'm aware of XP Mode, however I haven't been able to find the installation disk for some of the applications as of yet and I'm loosing hope of doing so any time soon.

Short description of what I've tried.

I've got some minor experience with virtualizing physical machines but the tactic I took the first time around doesn't seem to work well with this particular machine. I used Disk2vhd on an old XP home machine I had laying around and was able to get the VHD to boot in Virtualbox.

Note, I tried this on Virtualbox here after creating a VHD file. To keep things short, this didn't work with the machine at work. It wasn't booting properly and when I tried booting into safemode, it would freeze up at MUP.sys. Disabling this via the recovery console didn't do anything as it would get stuck at PPA.sys. I wasn't able to find a ton of information on this but I did narrow it down to possible being an unused ZIP drive.

End Description

My primary question concerns using VMware vCenter Converter Standalone and running the resulting creation in VMware Player. Are there certain things that I can do either on the physical machine or with Converter to make sure that things run as smoothly as possible?

I plan on removing and uninstalling the ZIP drive from the physical machine before trying to virtualize it. Should I remove the machine from the domain and create a local login beforehand or rename the virtual machine and add it as a new domain computer? It's a Server 2003 Domain.

 

[Norkimo]

I haven't personally used VMware's Player but from my experience with other VMware products (Workstation, ThinApp, etc.) their software is *very* good at what it does. I currently have 4 different OS's virtualized on my work PC (XP, Win7x64, Win7x86, and Ubuntu) using VMware Workstation and it couldn't of been any simpler. I wouldn't expect any issues at all going the VMware Player route.

I would however recommend removing the machine from the domain first and re-join once everything is working well.

 

[simm0]

Have a look here for some tips on using vSphere Converter:

http://vsphere-land.com/tips-tricks/converter-tips

http://ituda.com/vmware-p2v-converter-best-practices/

You will have the option to add and remove hardware from the machine you are converting during the conversion process.

You will need to decide beforehand what the "destination" of your converted machine is, this refers to the VMware product you will be using to run the new VM. VMware Player and Server are free (as is ESXi) but Workstation is a pay for product.

I run converter on a Domain from a management machine and do most of my conversions over the network on domain joined machines. I have had few issues with this but there are many that will say the best practice is to install vSphere Converter locally on the machine to be converted.

HTH
Simon.