Convert unformatted drive

[Wimo]

This weekend we are doing 3.5 to 4.1 V2Vs of several servers that each have 60 GB of formatted drives, and one 250 GB unformatted drive used by the application.  I'm trying to convince the app owner that we shouldn't need to bother with the unformatted drive, we can just create a new one after migration.  But is it even worth the argument?  I can see it going 2 ways converting it - hours or no time at all.  Anybody done this before?

[weinstein5]

Tell the owner you will - only bring over the drive(s) that is formatted and then add new drives to the VM

[continuum]

> I'm trying to convince the app owner that we shouldn't need to bother  with the unformatted drive, we can just create a new one after  migration.

the app owner should listen to you
a unformatted drive can not be included as far as I know - it also makes no sense at all

[patanassov]

Perhaps the app uses the unformatted drive as a raw device ans stores actual data on it. Converter can't do P2V of such machines unfortunately. However, if you want to V2V, you could use disk based cloning. May be some raw device mapping would need to be configured manually afterwards, but I haven't done it before.

HTH,

Plamen

[Wimo]

The application uses that drive - not sure of the details, but it is for security.  It's a call recording app.

So anyway, yes you can do this, using the built-in Converter (Import Machine), choose VMware Infrastructue virtual machine, as a cold migration.  I think they tried first to do a hot migration but that failed.  So I don't know how you would do this as a P2V, but fortunately these are all VMs.