Posted by: andy
Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 09/10/2007 03:56
I want to virtualize a couple of old servers whose hardware is on its last legs. So I am planning to move them onto VMWare or Virtual PC on another machine.
I am lazy, so I want to do the least work possible.
Ideally what I want to do is just convert the partitions on the existing hard drives on the two machines into VMWare/VPC disk files.
It doesn't look like VPC is capable of doing this itself (I don't know about VMWare as I have only ever used the VMWare player). I did some Googling to see if there were any other tools out there to do it, but couldn't find anything.
One server is a Linux box, with just a root partition and a swap partition on an IDE drive, the other is a Windows box with a single NTFS partition on hardware RAID array.
Can I do what I want to and how ?
Posted by: Phoenix42
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 09/10/2007 10:53
For the Windows system you can used VMware's
Converter to do the heavy lifting - it is free.
It does have some experimental support for converting Linux systems - but the source systems needs to be SCSI based.
Posted by: andy
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 09/10/2007 11:31
Ok, so it looks like I have a good solution(s) for the Windows box.
I can very easily put the Linux partitions into files using cat or dd. Surely there must be a tool somewhere that can turn a raw partition file into a hard disk file matching either the VMWare or VPC format ? (the VMWare converter appears to be able to convert between VMWare/VPC and convert a couple of backup formats, but I can't see any way of converting raw partitions)
Posted by: andy
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 09/10/2007 12:09
Ok, looks like I found the magic word. Searching for "p2v" (physical to virtual) turns up a lot more useful stuff than I had managed to find before.
Looks like I can achieve the Linux migration like this:
- create target VM, complete with empty virtual disks
- boot target VM using a Linux boot CD
- boot source machine using a Linux boot CD
- use dd+nc to stream raw partitions from source to target
The remaining challenge will be to get working Redhat 7.1 drivers for the VMWare/VPC "hardware".
Posted by: Phoenix42
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 09/10/2007 12:18
Might it be quicker to build a new virtual machine and then copy across the application it hosts?
Posted by: andy
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 09/10/2007 14:08
It won't, it is my main email/domain server with years of accumulated config and custom scripts. I have been putting off moving it across to a more recent version of Linux for years now.
Posted by: andy
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 09/10/2007 18:18
As Tom says, I don't expect too many problems on that front. The only real hardware to worry about is the IDE or SCSI controller and the network card. I don't run X Windows on this server and the kernel it is running is just the totally bog standard one.
Posted by: Phoenix42
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 10/10/2007 10:32
The Converter & other P2V applications do handle the hardware change for you. Though it is a best practice to go into device manager and clean up the stale hardware.
This morning I am migrating a Dell GX270 running XP and later a Micron NetFRAME 6200 running 2003 into our virtual environment. I've found the VMware tool to work well for 2000 & 2003, not so good on NT, though this was with the older version of the tool, as for Linux, there is some experimental support but as I am not a Linux person I've not played with it.
The VMware forums are pretty good, some one there might be able to advise you on how to migrate it rather then rebuild it.
Posted by: wfaulk
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 10/10/2007 15:21
Except that newer versions of Windows will probably see all those hardware changes and force you to reregister your serial number or some such shit.
Posted by: tfabris
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 10/10/2007 15:47
Which shouldn't be a problem if it's a legit version of Windows.
OH MY GOD I'VE BECOME ONE OF THEM KILL ME KILL ME NOW
Posted by: wfaulk
Re: Creating VMWare/VPC disk from real disk - 10/10/2007 16:06
I thought you could only change hardware like 3 times or something.