I give up migrating my Windows machine

[sjordi]

Hi,

I just bought a Macbook Air 13" 256Gb and wanted to migrate my Windows 7 PC as it was advertised on VMware sites.

What a deception. I will still try to fully reinstall Win7 in Boot Camp and see what VMWare can do with that, but my goal was NOT to reinstall everything.

My PC has a 120Gb hard drive, and only 40Gb are used.

Then I launched the migration process. First time through WiFi between the Macbook and the PC.

After analyzing the situation for about 2 hours, it told me that the migration would take 28 hours, which I didn't have.

This was awfully slow. So I followed the recommendations and connected both machines directly with an Ethernet cable in order to speed things up. 1Gbps to 1Gbps would be fine. So I supposed.

Now it analyzed the disk for 5 hours! Then it told me it would take 152 hours to migrate.

After 2 days working like crazy it migrated only 7%. This is not serious.

I do have all the latest patches (Fusion 4.0.2) but this tool is not usable at all.

Now, I have to install a boot camp partition in a hurry in order ot be able to use my Windows machine (the main reason I bought my Macbook Air) and can't try Fusion 4 anymore. I lost almost 3 days for nothing with that joke.

Was anybody really able to migrate a 40Gb hard disk in a hourly manner?
Any tip?

Should I switch to Parallels?

Thanks for any help.

[cmarcet]

I don't have the answers as I'm trying to do the same thing, but just wanted to commiserate. I've been trying for two weeks. I have two days left before I'm required to give my old PC back to my IT department, and I'm tearing my hair out, unable to figure out what I'm getting wrong.

[admin]

Just in case it helps. Migrations this size certainly have taken place, and shouldn't be take days or many hours. Some tips:

  1. don't use wifi, it's slow and often unreliable

  2. plug the PC directly into the Mac with an ethrnet cable, then power on.  Plugging both into a common hub or switch also works, but you may as well make it as simple as possible.

  3. since both of you may have speed problems, monitor your network use in Activity Monitor. Once the solid progress bar is solid blue, you should have at least 10mb/s (maybe much more , it's likely depending on HD speed on the slowest side).

  4. make sure you have no firewalls on, Fusion handles Windows Firewall, but not the others for you.

  5. if all else fails, try VMware Converter (it's free).

That should work, I'm not sure where you are in your learning curve, but there is some information which might help.

http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/migrate.html

Don't worry too much if Fusion reports that it will take 28 hours at first. It should not take that long, however!

[sjordi]

Well,

in my case it was much faster through WiFi rather than direct Ethernet connection. This one is a disaster. Over a week of migration.

Wifi gave me about a few days.

Anyway, I abandonned Fusion and installed a full new Windows on my Mac, from scratch. Three days of work, lost, in order to install my compilers, and all its tools.

I'm not particularily happy about this. But did I have a choice?

[admin]

I'm sorry to hear that wifi was faster, there was definitely a bug or setup issue there.

If you mean that you set up Windows as Bootcamp, you can still use Fusion on the Mac side to run Bootcamp concurrently with Mac OS X, that might be convenient for you.

[sjordi]

Switched to Parallels,

migrated my former machine within 85 minutes! Not 11 days.

Works like a charm.

Goodbye VMWare.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Migrating physical machines always results in bloated VM's that are unstable.  You're always better off reinstalling and building a VM from scratch (with either product).

[ReVeLaTeD]

Doesn't matter now.  But for anyone else that might be curious...the behavior observed happened during my migration.  I also had a significantly faster migration with Parallels when moving my personal laptop to a VM.  My work laptop went without a hitch using VMWare over Ethernet, but that's after hours of fighting to get the space down.

What I discovered is that there are two things that can cause a slower migration estimate.

1: 64 bit PC.  For some reason it doesn't like it.  I don't know if there's additional configurations that it's trying to do or what.

2: Poorly managed source drive.  Meaning if you are not up on the defrag, or if the disk is unhealthy, it can cause issues when trying to migrate.

The other thing is that the converter is not smart enough - and I commented on this over two years ago - to look at space used instead of drive capacity.  So more time is wasted doing that move.

Parallels just does the move, and no, I didn't end up with a bloated VM when I used Parallels to migrate that PC laptop (due to VMWare's refusal to do it).  I still have it, still works good, not bloated at all.  In fact it runs even better than the Boot Camp VM.  There are times I recommend doing that just to get it virtualized, then move it into VMWare if that's what you have to use.