Please note: I undertand that the SAN, OS and vmware
conversion is not supported for me as these servers
are domain controllers and database servers
That is not true. What you may have heard is that P2V'ing domain controllers and database servers can lead to complications during the process, but there are many people who have successfully converted such workloads into VMs without problems.
What I need to know is your
recommendations and best practices for the
conversion.
The conversion process boils down to 3 steps:
1. imaging. We have to take a copy of the disks and overlay them onto new virtual disks.
2. configuring. Doing #1 is nothing more than a backup/restore. You have to change the drivers to make the VM bootable. It's no different than taking an image of a Dell PE and restoring it onto an HP Proliant, for example. The Proliant won't boot up automatically without some intervention.
3. cleanup. After the VM boots up you'll need to configure the networking, etc.
Converter does #1 and #2 automatically as it creates a VM for you, copies the visible disks, and does the configuring. You can also use an imaging application on your own and then run Converter only for #2.
Since your source disk is on the SAN, one strategy is to use your SAN replication and replicate to another LUN. On ESX Server you can create a VM and Map to SAN LUN to use the replicated volume. Run Converter against the VM to make it bootable.
You can use Converter to do the cloning which will take a longer time to copy the source disk to a new virtual disk. Converter always creates a VM and virtual disk if you use it to do the #1 step, if you want Converter to do the cloning.
