Request for suggestions....how would you handle this?

[tupelo_operatio]

We have been tasked with a virtualization assignment and I am not quite sure what the best route to take on it. I was wondering how you guys would accomplish this.

The Scenario

A remote data center has two or three servers hosted there that will need to be moved to our local data center. One option is obviously to power down the servers, box them up, and ship them to us. Ideally we would like to virtualize these servers into our VI environment which would require us to P2V the servers. We have pretty much ruled out doing the P2V over the wire as it would be too bandwidth intensive. This would leave the option of physically going onsite to perform or via remote access means. I had the idea of purchasing a NAS device and IP addressing it with an IP address of the remote network, but I was not sure how I would point the VMware Convertor to the NAS device...although I am thinking it would simply be a UNC path. Another idea we have kicked around is buying a USB drive with alot of space and physically attaching it to the servers to be P2V'd. I am just not sure what would be the most effiecient means of getting this accomplished.

Have any of you faced a task similar to this?...if so I would love to hear about it.

Grant

[jitendrakmr]

If it is just 2 or three servers then best option is to create ghost image of those servers and store them on any external/portable/usb storage. You can bring these ghost images back to your datacenter and can convert into any format (virtual or physical).

Hope that helps.

Jitendra Kumar

MCSE 2003, VCP, CCNA, ITIL Foundation

[kjb007]

You can do this as you were describing. Install vmware converter in the server itself, and then you can run converter and choose this machine when you select the source. The destination will be stand-alone vm, and you can point it to a network path, which would be your NAS device. For only a few servers, I would use this way as well.

Good luck,

-KjB

[KyawH]

I reckon both NAS device or USB portable device will just be fine as a mean to transport the image or VM files. The easiest way would be to install converter on one of your servers or even a laptop and attached USB device to it. Then hot-clone the servers with VMware Converter, select source IPs for your server that needs to be converted on each conversion, use standalone format as destination format, and USB device as a destination for new VMs. After that you know what to do.

Hope this helps.

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[Texiwill]

Hello,

As the others have stated using VMware COnverter is suggested. YOu will need some local storage on which to put the resultant VMs. This can be a portable USB device or anything else that can handle the size of the VMs. You can then either ship the portable device or transfer the VMs over the network once they are made.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[tupelo_operatio]

When using the VMware Converter, it only P2Vs used drive space right? For instance, one of the servers has 68GB of space total but only 29GB are currently used...so the P2V process on this server would yield a vmdk size of 29GB right?

[Rockapot]

Done this hundreds of times now.., both options you mentioned would work fine.., if you are going for the USB storage route I usually get something slightly more versatile with RAID to save me from all my hard work if something goes wrong with the USB device during transit (however unlikely!).

As for your last question "it only P2V's te used drive space right?" you have the option to shrink the disk during the conversion to only consume the used disk space. I usually add about 20% free disk space on top for contingency.

Regards

Carl

[tupelo_operatio]

Well I have been on my trip and did P2Vs of two of the servers at the location. One of the servers is running Windows 2000 Server is a "PDC" in Active Directory. Apparently P2Ving an Active Directory is not a good idea as it BSODs upon bootup back at my office. The other server is a Windows Server 2003 that solely acts as a file server. When I booted up this server and attempted to login, I got a message about needing to re-activate Windows. I am guessing the P2V on the 2003 server is what caused the activation message eh? I think I should be able to re-activate the server without a problem but the issue(s) on the 2000 server is another issue all together. In terms of importance...the 2000 server is the most important server in that it runs an ERP system called ABBA that runs on a Picks OS emulator. Is it documented anywhere about not being able to P2V a Windows 2000 Server AD server?

Grant

[TomHowarth]

Default is to just capture the disk, however under "Source Data" you get the change to resize disks, (note this is only supported for windows guests)

I have moved this thread to the VMware Converter forum

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[TomHowarth]

Well I have been on my trip and did P2Vs of two of the servers at the location. One of the servers is running Windows 2000 Server is a "PDC" in Active Directory. Apparently P2Ving an Active Directory is not a good idea as it BSODs upon bootup back at my office.

Yep P2Ving a DC is not a good idea, it is much easier to just create a new machine and DCPromo

>The other server is a Windows Server 2003 that solely acts as a file server. When I booted up this server and attempted to login, I got a message about needing to re-activate Windows.

This would suggest that the Windows 2003 server on that Machine was a OEM licensed copy, to be legal you really need to "upgrade" your OS to a MOLP licensed version.

>I am guessing the P2V on the 2003 server is what caused the activation message eh?

Yep

>I think I should be able to re-activate the server without a problem but the issue(s) on the 2000 server is another issue all together. In terms of importance...the 2000 server is the most important server in that it runs an ERP system called ABBA that runs on a Picks OS emulator. Is it documented anywhere about not being able to P2V a Windows 2000 Server AD server?

create a new machine DCPromo it to the same domain, seice the FSMO roles and then DCPromc the original machine. P2V it.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[KyawH]

We have done many P2V of Windows 2000 AD server without any issue.

Your Windows 2003 server software must be an OEM which requires activation after hardware changes. When you do P2V, the underlying hardware do get changed. You need to migrate this server instead of P2V unless you purchase volume license for it.

[tupelo_operatio]

I fixed the issue with the BSOD on Win 2000 AD by mounting the vmdk on my local workstation and putting the correct version of scsiport.sys on the vmdk. The issue I am having now is with the vm wanting re-activation and will not allow me to login to the server to manipulate the IP address of the server until it has been reactivated. Apparently the P2V process caused the server to lose its static IP address and it pulled a DHCP address on our network. Our DHCP addressed machines are required to access the internet through a proxy server and must enter credentials to get out and access the internet. Since I cannot get access to the desktop of the server, I cannot enter these credentials for the server to use. I tracked down the IP address and am able to ping the server and access it with psexec to get a commandline and so forth. My issue now is to get the server switched over to a static IP address since our static server addresses do not have to go through our proxy server to access the internet. I am able to connect to the server via remote registry and have found the portion where the IP address information is stored as well as the EnableDHCP registry key. I set the EnableDHCP key from 1 to 0 to disable and then set the correct IP address where appropriate. I rebooted the server but it is still using the DHCP address. Anyone know a way around this?

Grant

[vmroyale]

See if netsh or proxycfg can help.

[tupelo_operatio]

Well...the hits just keep on coming. I used WinSCP to move the P2V'd server files into our VI3 infrastructure and added the server to the inventory. When I power on the VM, I get an error of:

"Device 'Hard Disk1' has a backing type that is not supported. This is a general limitation of the host."

Does this mean there was a problem during the P2V process?

When I did the P2V of the server at the remote site using VMware Converter, I selected "Physical Computer" as source type and chose "This local machine" on the source login dialogue. For destination I chose "VMware standalone virtual machine" and then named it and pointed to my NAS device for the location. For the type of virtual machine to create, I was exactly sure what to pick but I am fairly sure I picked the Workstation 5.x selection. Is this what is causing the error message?

Grant