Question About Importing Physical Machines using VMWare Workstation 6.5.2. Need IDE Hard Drive, Not SCSI.

[OnBaseTravis]

I have been unable to figure this out. I have been able to import Physical Machines OK using the import/export wizard in VMWare Workstation but discovered an issue afterwards. The version of Ghost we use is not able to capture an image of a SCSI based VM but the import process creates a SCSI hard drive automatically and I have been unable to find an option to choose IDE or a way to convert it after the import to the new VM.

What I'm doing is trying to capture a few of our department specific images that were originally built on Dell D610's and avoid having to rebuild them all in a VM by hand. Once I import the raw image off the PC I would use our imaging utility and Ghost to upload VM based master images. It would be nice to spend a few days importing our existing images off a physical machine rather than spend a few weeks creating all new images.

A side question would be does anyone use a GhostCast 11 server to capture SCSI based VM images? That would probably solve my issue as well.

Thanks ahead of time for any input anyone can offer.

[mikefoley]

Does Ghostcast use WinPE for its boot disk? If so, you might want to look into adding the VMware SCSI drivers into that boot disk. Then the boot disk would see the SCSI devices.

mike

[Meckron]

I use Ghost and VMware. Do you have the Ghost Client installed on the VM? If so, you should just be able to initiate an Image Create Task via the Console and pull the image. I've done that successfully with the SCSI Buslogic drive for the VM guest and restored an image over it as well.

[OnBaseTravis]

At this point I have been ghosting them the way that the last person did it. I PXE booting the VMs off the network straight into Ghost which has worked great when the VM hard drives are IDE but just sits when its SCSI.

These are both good ideas. I don't administer the server that GhostCast sits on (yet), I'll check with the admin to see about adding the SCSI driver to the boot image but I can try booting off a Ghost disk now. Thanks for the help. I also found that we are a few versions behind on the Ghost Solution Suite and we have a maintnence contract. I'm trying to have that upgraded.

[Meckron]

Definitely shoot for GSS 2, then, and all it's patches. It comes with the abilty to create WinPE images (Windows based instead of DOS based Ghosting) and add storage/network drivers to the WinPE images as well as supporting the .vmdk file format for imaging. I believe the PXE boot stuff is still an option as well, though you definitely don't get as good of driver support like you do when using WinPE.

Also, you may want to search the Symantec Connect forums for Ghost Solution Suite. You may find some other tips/tricks that may help you out with your current version of Ghost until you can get it upgraded.